How to troubleshoot slow network performance with Realtek 8169s?

Juha Saarinen juhasaarinen at gmail.com
Mon Jul 4 20:49:10 GMT 2005


On 7/4/05, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:
> This isn't weird at all.  It is a driver issue.  Remember I said the
> driver hasn't been optimized.  The driver could be letting the card
> seize the PCI bus for an inordinate amount of time or some such.  This
> could also be an interaction with the card, the driver, and some bios
> setting of your motherboard.  This could be, for example, not allowing
> enough cpu time for a higher-overhead program like FTP to run at full
> speed, while allowing a lower overhead program like iperf, enough time
> to run at full blast.  I have seen issues like this before and they
> have almost always been solved by swapping hardware.
> 
> I have in fact swapped hardware that acted up in one machine to
> a different machine that had a different motherboard, same FreeBSD
> versions on both systems, and that hardware became rock-solid in
> the new motherboard.
> 
> Frankly it all depends on what you want to do.  If this is a production
> system you are going to need it online and you can't waste the time
> to screw around with it - in that case you know the Intel chipset works
> well in that motherboard, so replace the Realtek.  If however this is
> a fun-n-games system then keep the Realtek in there and file a send-pr
> and work it that way.

Righto, that, too, makes sense.

Will engage in some further investigation (read: hardware swapping and
head scratching) to narrow things down.




-- 

Juha


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