iMac and FreeBSD performance problems

[Bill Vermillion]

Even though on Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 01:01  Keith Mitchell 
 realized that everything he says should be taken cum grano salis, he 
 unhesitatingly continued with this missive:


> I'm trying to figure out why my FreeBSD box and my iMac are having
> trouble communicating at 100 Mbs full-duplex.

> To briefly describe my LAN setup, I have a 16port linksys
> 10/100 ethernet switch connected to two FreeBSD systems, an
> iMac, a PC and some other miscellaneous stuff. Everything works
> fine except the interaction between the iMac and the FreeBSD
> machines.


> What I see is extremely slow transfers (FTP/TFTP at least) from
> the FreeBSD machines to the iMac. The reverse direction (from
> the iMac to the FreeBSD machiens work fine). If this isn't bad
> enough, if I connect the iMac to a 10BT hub instead of the
> ethernet switch then everything seems to work fine as well.
> The iMac can talk to all the other equipment without a problem
> when its connected to the ethernet switch. Likewise the FreeBSD
> machines can talk to each other without any problems and to all
> of the other networking equipment.... they just can't talk to
> the iMac efficiently.

I've seen this as a client has 2 G4s and an xrack in our rack
space.   All machines go through a Cisco 2948, that goes through a
bride on an Etinc BWManager, to a 7120, then to the facility
gigabit switch.

Transfers between any of the Apple machines are blazingly fast.
>From the FBSD machines in the rack to anywhere else speed is fast.
But between the BSD and the Apples speed drops to the 10KB ranage
at times.

>From the outside world the transfers from the BSD machines are
limited only by connectivity and I got 6Mb/sec transfers from some
SW at AT&T to the local machines recently - as we are on a Level 3
backbone and it's fast.

I've also heard via a 3rd party that a person we are associated
with at Omneon Video Technologies [omneon.com] that they had the
problem there.  They reportedly got a patch from Apple on this, but
this appears to be something which is not distributed.

Last week I was at an SACD listening party given by an engineer
friend of mine and they were all engineers, musicians, producers,
etc., and all used Macs and ProTools.  A well known CD mastering
engineer asked me if I knew why is Mac to XP transfers were so
slow.

So this a problem - not widespread - and not occuring everywhere.
It's just some machines at some times.

Just throwing this out as it appears not be isolated but not a big
enough problem that Apple addressed in a general patch/fix - IF
what I was told that what Omneon experienced is true.

> Anyone have any clues on this bizarre problem?

No.

But I'm going to see if I can trace down what I have heard, that
may only be rumors.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com