W95 speed issue

[John LeMay]

I saw similar performane issues on a shared 10 Mbit/s segment here
between a Linux 2.2.9 Samba 2.0.5a box and a Win98 client. Tried an
NT4/SP4 client with roughly half the processing power and memory of the
Win95 box and received much better results. The data being transfered
was a binary file. I didn't go to far into this at the time.

Upon reading your note I tried a similar test using an ascii file of
about 1 Mbyte and tried the test between the same two Win stations and
the same Linux box, this time with kernel 2.2.12. I used NAI's
Distributed Sniffer Pro 3.0.10 to monitor. Both machines were able to
transfer the file using 1514 byte packets in just over 1 second (around
1.1, but I have to figure in some error) this time. The Win98 machine
uses a 3C900 combo card and the NT machine uses a 3C905b-TX card, as
does my Linux box. My delays were as follows:

Win98
-----
Latency between Data packet and ACK: 0.15 second (measured around 0.155
pretty consistently)
Latency between ACK and next Read: 0.30 second (range 0.28 - 0.35)

WinNT SP#4
----------
Latency between ACK and next Data packet: 0.30 second (range 0.25 -
0.35)

The traces didn't read quite the same, so a true apples to apples
comparison of the traces wasn't possible. One can deduce that since the
traces were kinda different, there are differences in how NT and Win98
perform network communications. This could explain delay in some
environments, however I don't know that a crossover cable should be one
of those environments.


Edward Schernau wrote:
> 
> Hello all, I've got a W95 box connected via crossover to a 2.2.12
> RH 6.0 linux box, running 2.0.3 samba.
> 
> Writes to samba from Win explorer are around 450 K/sec.
> Reads from samba to Windows using Explorer are around 8 K/sec.
> 
> Using the smb version of tcpdump, I see between a .200 and .220
> second lag between packets.  smbd is nowhere near the top of my
> "top" list output in linux.
> 
> Is there a hack to avoid this?  What can I do to Win95 to speed
> this up?  FTP from the linux machine is also slow, but NFS is
> less slow (150 K/sec).  Ftp from the linux server to the same
> Windows95, booted into Linux, give me 750 K/sec.
> 
> So it's W95.  Any ideas?
> 
> Ed

-- 
John J. LeMay Jr.
NJMC, LLC.
http://www.njmc.com