Hi!

I'm having a funny problem on a Digital AlphaPC 164LX 533 MHz.  While
doing network backups I'm getting awful performance.  When I'm
transferring data both from the network and disk I'm getting about 500
kilo-bytes per second, which is pitiful.  I'm running NetBSD 1.4T.

If I do rsh remotehost "dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024" | dd of=/dev/null
bs=1024 I get about 6 megabytes per second, which is ok so network
performance is OK.

If I do dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 of=/tmp/somefile I get about 10
megabytes per second, which is ok so disk performance is OK.

Now if I do rsh remotehost "dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024" | dd
of=/tmp/somefile bs=1024 I get 500K-bytes/s; warm molasses speed.
What gives?  Other dd buffer sizes (1b, 1k, 4k, 512k) do not help.

There is no load on this machine.  I get no messages logged, I've tried
just about everything and as soon as I do network and disk I/O (either
SCSI or IDE) it crawls.  The same tests done on a similar linux box
give me ~5M-Bytes/s.

Please help,  Thanks.
-- 
Danny Chouinard <danny@cim.mcgill.ca>
Center for Intelligent Machines, Systems Programmer, McGill U.