Network Speed Question

[Trox]

Hi there, First post!

My network consists of 2 PCs, Wii and a PS3 but im mainly concerned about the two PCs network speed.

The setup is as follows...
PC1
Windows XP
Onboard 10/100/1000 NIC (Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010)

PC2
Windows Vista Home Prem
Onboard NIC 10/100/1000 NIC (nVidia nForce)

Router
Dlink DIR-655 (A2)
Firmware 1.11

I have enabled Tx Rx Flow Control which gave the network a nice boost, sending a large 4GB file in 22MB/s.
I have also done a test with Iperf, the rusults:

c:\ipref>iperf -c 192.168.0.199
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.199, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[180] local 192.168.0.101 port 49639 connected with 192.168.0.199 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[180] 0.0-10.0 sec 299 MBytes 251 Mbits/sec​

I guess im wondering why these figures are so low, and if there is anything i can do to help speed this up more.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated

Cheers

 

[thiggins]

What was your speed before you enabled flow control?

What speed do you get with a 100 Mbps connection?

 

[Madwand]

You can try changing the parameters to iperf. E.g. as follows:

iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

On the nVIDIA NIC, you could try both "Optimize for CPU" and "Optimize for Throughput" to see which one is more consistently faster.

Marvell PCI NICs are some of the slower ones around for throughput (while their CPU utilization is better than some others). If your nVIDIA NIC and switch also have jumbo frame support, you could try turning that on.

 

[00Roush]

Here is what I use for iperf:
iperf -w 32k -c server ip
If you want it in MB/s format use:
iperf -w 32k -f M -c server ip

Could you tell us a few more specs on each machine and which is the server and which is the client? Like how fast and amount of memory.

I ran a few tests at home to give you an idea of speeds others might see.

Server:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8ghz)
1gb RAM
Onboard PCI-E NIC 10/100/1000 (nVidia nForce)
Win XP PRO SP2

Client:
AMD Opteron 165 @ 2.8ghz
1gb RAM
Onboard PCI-E NIC 10/100/1000 (Marvell Yukon 88E8053)
Onboard PCI NIC 10/100/1000 (Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010)
Win XP PRO SP2

Running iperf on the client using the same Marvell card you have I get about 397 Mbits/sec. Running iperf on the server I get around 650 Mbits/sec. Actual file transfer speeds are around 47MB/sec from the server to the client and around 40MB/sec from the client to the server.

Basically the Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010 is the bottleneck as it is on the PCI bus. From what I can tell the max a PCI based network card can do is about 45-47MB/sec for file transfers. It can go higher if it was not writing/reading from the disk as is the case in my iperf tests. Just trying to give you an idea of what you can expect.

Also in case you were wondering I am running the latest drivers from Nvidia and the latest driver from Marvell. Here is the configuration I had for the network cards while testing:

Nvidia:
checksum offload enable
flow control enable
ieee802.1p disable
jumbo frame payload size 1500
optimize for throughput
segmentation offload enable
speed/duplex settings full auto

Marvell:
802.1p support off
flow control tx & rx enabled
interrupt moderation enabled
jumbo packet 1514 bytes
max irq per sec 5000
receive buffers 500
speed & duplex auto
tcp/udp checksum offload (ipv4) on
transmit buffers 200

I might be able to help further if these setting don't help.

00Roush

 

[tipstir]

You know you can over clock that CPU on that AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8ghz). I have 2 of those CPU AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (1.8ghz) now (2.4GHz) That would give you an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.4ghz) with the stock fan/heat sink.

 

[00Roush]

You know you can over clock that CPU on that AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8ghz). I have 2 of those CPU AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (1.8ghz) now (2.4GHz) That would give you an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.4ghz) with the stock fan/heat sink.

HEHE didn't you notice the Opteron 165 (1.8ghz stock) @ 2.8ghz?!

I have thought about overclocking it but as it is the file server for the house I felt I should leave it alone.

Thanks for the tip though.

00Roush

 

[Madwand]

Basically the Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010 is the bottleneck as it is on the PCI bus. From what I can tell the max a PCI based network card can do is about 45-47MB/sec for file transfers.

I've exceeded 800 Mb/s iperf and 95 MB/s actual file transfers with a Marvell PCI NIC.

 

[tipstir]

HEHE didn't you notice the Opteron 165 (1.8ghz stock) @ 2.8ghz?!

I have thought about overclocking it but as it is the file server for the house I felt I should leave it alone.

Thanks for the tip though.

00Roush

Not hard to do, if you change your mind or need help let me know? Just a few settings in the BIOS and you're done. Not rocket science. Intel and AMD servers are running OC. Intel since 2004/2005 24/7 on As with both of them 2006 AMD on no problems with OC. Anyway yes the main file server is important if that goes down there goes your network structure.

 

[tipstir]

I've exceeded 800 Mb/s iperf and 95 MB/s actual file transfers with a Marvell PCI NIC.

Use a buffering copy program and really move more using some of your RAM 256KB. Teracopy freebie does that on that gig. You can increase network buffers on the OS beside the NIC. Tweak to the max to get near GIG performance.

 

[Madwand]

Tweak to the max to get near GIG performance.

My figures are actually pretty good for that NIC, which is not especially fast, and hampered by the PCI interface.

There isn't that much room for improvement, but if you have a Marvell PCI NIC which you can demonstrate doing even better, then I suppose the details of the technique might be interesting.

 

[00Roush]

I've exceeded 800 Mb/s iperf and 95 MB/s actual file transfers with a Marvell PCI NIC.

Which side was the PCI network card on? Was it on the side that was being written to or read from?

00Roush

 

[00Roush]

Use a buffering copy program and really move more using some of your RAM 256KB. Teracopy freebie does that on that gig. You can increase network buffers on the OS beside the NIC. Tweak to the max to get near GIG performance.

Are you referring to getting near gigabit performance out of a PCI, PCI-X, or PCI-E based network card?

00Roush

 

[Madwand]

Which side was the PCI network card on? Was it on the side that was being written to or read from?

I do iperf tests in both directions, as shown in the command line options above. I've benched the Marvell PCI doing about 800 Mb/s outgoing, and about 900 Mb/s incoming.

I have less clear data about the file transfers. I think it was a pull from Vista to Vista, with the Marvell PCI NIC being local.

 

[tipstir]

this iperf fails to connect .. I've check the server side firewall it's allow to run still times out

 

[tipstir]

Server side 800 to 916