Tuning gigabit on P4PE

Hi Asus experts. I have a P4PE with gigabit onboard LAN (broadcom
57xx). I am trying to fine tune it to make sure it is using full
duplex gigabit without ever dropping back to 100M. In the driver
control panel there is no option to force it to full duplex gigabit,
there is for 10 and 100M, but not for gigabit. I set it to auto and
the status dialog says it is gigabit, the linksys gigabit router has
the giga led lit.. ok... but i'm not getting full gigabit between two
computers..not even close..and just trying to make sure I have this
computer configured to be absolutely gigabit with no potential for
dropping down the 100M (which I presume auto might do if it detected
momentary dropouts, etc.).

Any clues about this?

Also, anyone know of any good ways to benchmark my PC's to see the
actual net performance I'm getting from them within my subnet?

thanks

In article .com,
"Dewdman42" wrote:

Hi Asus experts. I have a P4PE with gigabit onboard LAN (broadcom
57xx). I am trying to fine tune it to make sure it is using full
duplex gigabit without ever dropping back to 100M. In the driver
control panel there is no option to force it to full duplex gigabit,
there is for 10 and 100M, but not for gigabit. I set it to auto and
the status dialog says it is gigabit, the linksys gigabit router has
the giga led lit.. ok... but i'm not getting full gigabit between two
computers..not even close..and just trying to make sure I have this
computer configured to be absolutely gigabit with no potential for
dropping down the 100M (which I presume auto might do if it detected
momentary dropouts, etc.).

Any clues about this?

Also, anyone know of any good ways to benchmark my PC's to see the
actual net performance I'm getting from them within my subnet?

thanks

On Win2K, I was able to hit about 40MB/sec between two Gigabit
computers (direct connect, no Gigabit switch). An article I read,
suggested Win2K would give about 300Mbits/sec out of the
possible 1000. WinXP probably has better performance than that.

To do my testing, I set up a RAM disk on each computer. I used
FTP protocol, to get the fastest possible performance. That
should be faster than sharing via Windows. In fact, the
performance varies quite a bit, depending on which end of
my link was the client, and which was the server. Pushing
or pulling data made a difference too. 40MB/sec was the very
best I was able to do, with some of the other results being
more mediocre (maybe half that).

Finally, if you were compute limited, maybe enabling "Jumbo
packets" would help. My recollection is foggy now, but I
think because I had ICS enabled during the test, that prevents
Jumbo packets from being used.

Interaction between the networking, and the disk subsystem,
may reduce performance further. That is why I used a
RAM disk when benchmarking, in the hope that the RAM disk
would not affect the benchmark that much. It is an uphill
battle - getting the LED to light up is the least of
your worries.

Paul

Dewdman42 wrote:
Hi Asus experts. I have a P4PE with gigabit onboard LAN (broadcom
57xx). I am trying to fine tune it to make sure it is using full
duplex gigabit without ever dropping back to 100M. In the driver
control panel there is no option to force it to full duplex gigabit,
there is for 10 and 100M, but not for gigabit. I set it to auto and
the status dialog says it is gigabit, the linksys gigabit router has
the giga led lit.. ok... but i'm not getting full gigabit between two
computers..not even close..

It's not easy to get close to full gigabit speeds between two machines.
The PCI bus, disk access, etc. can become major bottlenecks. Also, you
may need jumbo frames enabled on both sides in order

and just trying to make sure I have this
computer configured to be absolutely gigabit with no potential for
dropping down the 100M (which I presume auto might do if it detected
momentary dropouts, etc.).

I don't know any NIC card that does this. If the router says the link is
at gigabit speed, it should stay like that.

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

More testing last night with cat-6 cables that made zero difference.
Clearly the netgear PCMCIA card in my laptop is not doing very well. I
got up to 50MB/sec between my two P4PE machines, even without any fancy
tweaks as mentioned above. Though for some strange reason I only get
40MB/sec in one direction, while 50MB/sec in the other. This could be
related to the fact that one machine has a firewire professional audio
soundcard on it..which even though there was no audio coming out...it
could be hogging some bandwidth from the PCI bus... hard to say...

In any case, when connecting between either P4PE and the laptop, I get
much worse performance. I'm using Netgear GA511 PCMCIA gigabit adapter
there. It can receive from the P4PE at 35MB/sec, but it can only send
the other direction at a measly 21MB/sec which is barely faster than
100Mbit. I'm going to try to follow up on that. I suspect the problem
may not be in the card itself but rather in the PCMCIA bus of my
laptop...who knows...

Anyway, thanks all..