On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 07:02:57PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> [[ the other machine is a very FAST dual-CPU AMD Opteron 1.8GHz FreeBSD
> box with an i82546 card hooked back-to-back with this one and otherwise
> sitting idle ]]

I've repeatedly seen strange, unexpectedly low throughput numbers from
wm cards hooked up back-to-back (including with the Intel-supplied driver
on Linux).  I was able to reproduce this with Marvell cards that supposedly
use the same PHY block, as well, which makes me think that there may be
something about that combination of that PHY and the use of another such
(instead of a switch) as the link partner that causes poor performance.

Can you throw a cheap (but modern) switch in the middle and see if you
get the same or different results?

Thor