Typical Network Performance

[David Brodbeck]

On Aug 1, 2010, at 2:18 PM, Jason C. Wells wrote:

> I have a 100 mbps (12,207 KiB/s) home LAN in full-duplex.  A 1 MiB  
> file transfers at 146.7 KiB/s via wput.  The same file transfers at  
> 91.34 KiB/s via samba.  That's less than 1% of available transfer  
> rate.  Seems like my transfers are slow.  I do better than that when  
> installing via the internet.
>
> Does the FTP performance compared to available bandwidth seem  
> right?  Is the relative performance of samba to FTP right?  I read a  
> couple quick links on the net which said, "It's complicated."

Those figures do  seem a little low.  Some stuff to check:

Are transfers in one direction a lot faster than transfers in the  
other?  If so, the machines and the network switch may not all be  
agreeing on the duplex mode.  Auto-negotiation sometimes fails and can  
lead to a lot of silent collisions, slowing things down dramatically.

How about the disk you're transferring from? Is it limiting the speed?  
Those figures would be fairly normal for a USB 1.0 drive, for example.

Are you sure all the machines involved are operating at 100 mbps?   
I've seen them silently fall back to 10 when there's a bad cable  
involved.