On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:33:31 -0500, Tim Kelly <hockey@dialectronics.com> wrote:
> 
> The reason for the packet dropping is because the buffer was empty, due
> to either not being written to or not contiguous (and these may have the
> same meaning). With no payload, the packet was dropped. However, the
> packet was resident somewhere else in memory and contained data critical
> to two way network traffic, hence the bad network performance.

I've seen a very similar problem on my B&W G3.  I dropped
net.inet.tcp.recvspace to 1024 and it cleared up the performance
issues locally. (and probably sendspace as well)

Amusingly enough I could get ~200KB/s from ftp.netbsd.org and < 20KB/s
from my local server.  My assumption is that the back to back local
packets were overflowing a buffer and getting dropped, while the
increased latency to ftp.netbsd.org through my cable modem was just
enough to prevent the back to back drops.

Anyway, I haven't tried 2.0 on my G3 yet, but soon hopefully I can and
see if the same problem still exists.

-Andrew