Network Driver / Performance

[Remy]

Network driver
With only 20% speed of what the system is able under windows.

To resume:
Under windows, I have 75Mbps
Under ArcaOS, I only have 10Mbps - all is going slow despite all optimization have been set (before optimization, speed was near 5 Mbps)

This seems to depend on what program you use, and what tool you use to measure it. It also depends on what else is running at the same time. I find that the network activity will slow dramatically, if you are also doing a large write to USB. I also see many cases where IPMON says that very little network activity is taking place, but RSunc is doing a multi gigabyte data transfer, at a reasonable speed. I also have an ArcaOS machine, that is used as a NAS. I often see it doing 30 to 40 MBs (according to IPMON, which seems to be unreliable) transfer speeds. when more that one machine is working on SAMBA.

I agree that there is a problem with something, but I don't agree that it is the network driver that is causing the problem. One possibility is that all drivers (or whatever does it) will only return a speed of 100 MBs, in OS/2. If a program actually looks at that, and follows it, the speed will be governed to 100 MBs. From what I see in IPMON (which is obviously unreliable)., the speed is far less than what windows does. If I time a network transfer, at half the speed of windows, it doesn't vary much.

I have the problem using my local NAS or going on intenet.
My conections are going though "CPL" this part has a mesure speed of up to 230Mbps under windows.
All test where done with only firefox up and running (going through Injoy firewal or not (no high impact seen when using injoy) , nothing else and each time, the speed is nearly 20% of what I have under windows. Display under firefox is much slower than under windows etc... ( unresponsive end point already often happens making me to disable/enable the interface to get again a responsive network with only the 20% of speed ! because I use a loy my nas and network, this is very impacting and using my nas for backup is not possible due to the long needed time to proceed )

Onboard shipset: Realtek RTL8111G     

[Dave Yeo]

Onboard shipset: Realtek RTL8111G     

This is probably your problem. My understanding is that these network cards (even if built in, I'll call it a card) are kind of like winmodems, they use the CPU too much instead of doing everything in hardware and need a highly tuned driver.
I'd suggest trying to find and test with a different non-Realtek card.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hi Remy!

...Onboard shipset: Realtek RTL8111G...

Quite a difference experience here from what Dave mentioned regarding the RTL hardware.

I am using the motherboard built-in NIC, that being:

Vendor 10ECh Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
Device 8168h RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
 Subsystem ID 75761462h Onboard RTL8111b on MSI P965 Platinum Mainboard (Guess Only!)
 Subsystem Vendor 1462h Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI]

The drivers are the AN "Drivers Subscription" MultiMAC MMRE versions, no problems. I have a Fibre 125Mbit connection, my NIC tests in the 120-126 Mbit range using any of the network speed tests and CPU utilization is nearly nil. Keep in my, that is on a 4.1GHz 5-core Phenom II X6 CPU...so your experience may certainly differ based on the power of your hardware.

This may be better suited for another thread, but when I switched from a DSL connector to the Fibre I did end up changing a number of TCP/IP settings...window sizes, etc, etc...each one of these helped. The biggest issued I had by far was the fact that I had a CAT5 cable between my OS/2 box and the router...maybe try something as simple as plugging in another CAT5e or CAT6 cable?

[Pete]

Hi All

I am also using an onboard RTL8168 nic happily with the AN Multimac MMRE driver:-

 Bus 5 (PCI Express), Device Number 0, Device Function 0
 Vendor 10ECh Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
 Device 8168h RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
 Subsystem ID E0001458h Unknown
 Subsystem Vendor 1458h Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd

No cpu strain at all.


Regards

Pete

[Doug Bissett]

I have the problem using my local NAS or going on intenet.

I have 6 Reatek gigabit NICS. Realtek can't seem to make up their minds about how their gigabit NICs actually work. Every version works different from those that came before. The only driver that seems to work properly, on all of them, is the Arca Noae supplied MMRE driver. Of course, my newest one is now a couple of years old, so they may have created yet another one (or two), that isn't working with MMRE. If you are using the latest MMRE driver, report the problem to Arca Noae, and see if it can be fixed. If you aren't using the latest, I strongly suggest getting it, and see if it helps.

It has been my experience, that manufacturers love Realtek products, because they are cheap. Being cheap, they don't work well, sometimes. With MMRE, the performance, that I see, is actually almost as good as what I see with my Intel gigabit NICs.

CAT5 cable between my OS/2 box and the router...maybe try something as simple as plugging in another CAT5e or CAT6 cable?

CAT5 should be okay, for anything less than 10 feet (3 meters), as long as it doesn't have a broken wire. With broken wires, the cable will often still work, but it will have problems. CAT5, CAT5e and CAT6 really aren't much different, for short runs, but the newer ones are supposed to be built to better quality standards, so the chances of having a bad connection should be far less (but certainly not impossible). Definitely, try different cables.

[Andi B.]

Cat5 is good enough for 100m and 100Base-TX and even more. But 100m is the standard and Cat5 is specified for that. For 1000Base-T Cat5e is specified and 100m have to work with it.

Though the 5 and 5e standard differ only in some additional measurement and most of the time the cable is/ was exactly the same. There is absolutely no reason to promote Cat6x or even higher if you do not use 10Gbit or more.

[Remy]

I have the problem using my local NAS or going on intenet.

I have 6 Reatek gigabit NICS. Realtek can't seem to make up their minds about how their gigabit NICs actually work. Every version works different from those that came before. The only driver that seems to work properly, on all of them, is the Arca Noae supplied MMRE driver. Of course, my newest one is now a couple of years old, so they may have created yet another one (or two), that isn't working with MMRE. If you are using the latest MMRE driver, report the problem to Arca Noae, and see if it can be fixed. If you aren't using the latest, I strongly suggest getting it, and see if it helps.

It has been my experience, that manufacturers love Realtek products, because they are cheap. Being cheap, they don't work well, sometimes. With MMRE, the performance, that I see, is actually almost as good as what I see with my Intel gigabit NICs.

CAT5 cable between my OS/2 box and the router...maybe try something as simple as plugging in another CAT5e or CAT6 cable?

CAT5 should be okay, for anything less than 10 feet (3 meters), as long as it doesn't have a broken wire. With broken wires, the cable will often still work, but it will have problems. CAT5, CAT5e and CAT6 really aren't much different, for short runs, but the newer ones are supposed to be built to better quality standards, so the chances of having a bad connection should be far less (but certainly not impossible). Definitely, try different cables.

Hi Doug,

I use latest Arca Noae MMRE.
The cables are fine ( up to above 250Mbps between end point ( pc - cable CPL -/- CPL - cable - fiber box ) tested under windows )

The shipset is on the mainboard one and no other external cards.
The mainboard is a MSI sli krait z97 

[Greg Pringle]

Cat5 is good enough for 100m and 100Base-TX and even more. But 100m is the standard and Cat5 is specified for that. For 1000Base-T Cat5e is specified and 100m have to work with it.

Though the 5 and 5e standard differ only in some additional measurement and most of the time the cable is/ was exactly the same. There is absolutely no reason to promote Cat6x or even higher if you do not use 10Gbit or more.

I do extensive networking. Cat6 is needed if the wires are in plenum (ceilings) and pass by interference from other electrical wires. Cat5(e) is not as well shielded and will cause some NICs to start to fail. Otherwise Cat5e will work for 1000m.

I just ran a speed test using 25mb fiber on my ArcaOS side and 5mb fiber on a Linux side.
These crossed the internet for Verizon FIOS to Sprint Business internet. (The Sprint side has an OC48 fiber connection at the Linux side building).

From the Linux side I used ftp and did a get:
150 Opening Binary mode data connection for /efs098va04.tar (20951040 bytes).
226 Binary transfer complete.                                               
20951040 bytes received in 00:42 (479.40 KB/s)

Fromthe Linux side I did an ftp put (To an FTP server I wrote in Java):
mput efs098va04.tar [anpqy?]? y                                                 
229 Extended Passive Mode Entered (|||65102|)                                   
150 Opening Binary mode data connection for /tmp/efs098va04.tar.               
100% |*************************************| 20460 KB  605.22 KB/s    00:00 ETA
226 Binary transfer complete.                                                   
20951040 bytes sent in 00:33 (602.53 KB/s)                                     

Note the speed seems to be limited only by the Sprint speed.

I then tested locally between Windows 10 and ArcaOS between two local subnets using a Netgear router in the middle.
I sent a file from the Windows 10 machine which was not in passive mode:
200 Type set to I.
ftp> put seim_winvmf.exe
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening Binary mode data connection for /tmp/seim_winvmf.exe.
226 Binary transfer complete.
ftp: 45924170 bytes sent in 6.18Seconds 7425.09Kbytes/sec.

Looks like the speed is fine.                                                                     
                               

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi. I split this topic about network performance.

I think I made a mess, I need more practice doing this.

Regards