Realtek 8139 (rl) very poor performance

Jorn Argelo jorn at wcborstel.nl
Thu Jan 20 10:37:02 PST 2005


On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:30:03 +0000, Imobach González Sosa wrote
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm havin' a strange problem with my Realtek Network Adapter. On 
> boot, the detection looks just fine:
> 
>  $ dmesg| grep rl
>  rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0xd000-0xd0ff mem 0xee000000-
> 0xee0000ff   irq 10 at device 10.0 on pci0 miibus0: <MII bus> on rl0 
> rlphy0: <RealTek internal media interface> on miibus0 rlphy0:  
> 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto rl0: Ethernet 
> address: 00:40:f4:32:e5:12
> 
> However, the performance is very poor. Some examples:
> 
> * using 'fetch' command, I get a lot of "timeouts", so some "ports" 
> fail to install (I have to retry). * using Konqueror, for instance,
>  I also get some "timeouts" and a very low speed connecting to 
> different websites.
> 
> I've done the some test on the same machine (and on my laptop) using 
> GNU/Linux, and works pretty fine. So I discarded a network hardware 
> issue as the origin of the problem.

If it's on an old machine then you have your problem there. The Realtek chips 
and its drivers put everything on the CPU, because the chip is not capable of 
doing too much. Which is why it's so cheap. Modern CPUs don't have too much 
problems with it, but older ones do. Of course, the Linux driver might be a 
bit better written then the FreeBSD one. It's advicable to get yourself a 
better network card if it's indeed an old machine.

Cheers,

Jorn


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