Lots of input errors...

[Shawn Ramsey]

> Improperly negotiating 100-BT/FD and generating lots of late collisions,
> for one.  Is the switch managed?  What does it's syslog output or the
> local CLI say about the port(s) in question?  In Cisco parlance, you may

I don't know offhand, it connects to another company, as its our internet
connection. We will contact them and see if they can tell us what the stats
(if any, I believe its a Cisco). The card is forced to 100BT/FD on our end,
and im sure it is on the other end, though I will have them double check
that as well. Performance at autoneg is terrible fwiw...

> want to clear the interface counters and observe 'sh int...' output while
> transferring a large file.  I must say, however, that if negotiation is to
> blame (and Cisco's is notoriously bad), you should be seeing degrading
> network performance.  (I think you'd notice that.)

Like I said earlier, autoneg performance is hiddeous, so I don't think that
is the issue.

>
> > I believe the same thing was happening on our
> > other interface when we had this much traffic going into it, and its
> > plug into a different switch entirely.
>
> Is it also xl0, and connected to the same brand of switch?  One thing to

Yes, same type of card, its connected to another ISP, a Cisco but I don't
know the model #.

> try if you rule out other issues (if the server isn't too busy to allow
> it) -- throw in another (non xl) NIC.  I haven't used xl* in awhile.  I
> doubt it's a driver issue, but swapping NICs may rule it out with
> certainty.

Thats one idea I was planning on doing, just to be sure its not a NIC issue.
I am also going to try replacing the motherboard with one with a 64-bit bus,
and isolate the gigabit ethernet on the 64-bit bus. That will also change
the RAM and CPU just incase there could be a bad piece of hardware other
than a NIC.