Subject: Re: pcmcia ep0 performance awful in 1.6/-current
To: Tom Spindler <dogcow@babymeat.com>
From: Nathan J. Williams <nathanw@wasabisystems.com>
List: current-users
Date: 07/09/2002 11:30:25
Tom Spindler <dogcow@babymeat.com> writes:

> Ever since going from 1.5.3 to 1.6, my NFS performance with my ep0
> pcmcia ether card has been appallingly awful. I have to crank my
> reads down to -r3072, and there's amazing amounts of stuttering
> when playing mp3s.
> 
> Have any of the rest of you seen this problem? (my xi0 pc card
> gives endless timeouts, and my ne0 pc card locks up the machine...)

On my NEC Versa 2405 (pentium 100) with a pcmcia ep0, with kernels
from mid-December and from this week's -current, I saw NFS hangs with
the default read and write size; the client would start "stuttering"
at the server, and requests would never complete. I have to admit that
I didn't rip apart the NFS packets I saw to examine in complete
detail, because I find hand-decoding RPC XDR pretty tedious, and I'm
not really an NFS guru.

Cranking down to -r=4096,-w=4096 fixed the problem, though, and
performance is decent - nearly 5 Mbps read and write speed. Playing
MP3s sounded fine.

Server is a 1.5ZC Alpha pc164 with a tlp0 set to 100baseTX-FDX, and
there's a little 5-port 10/100 switch between them.

        - Nathan