On Sun, 19 Nov 95 19:37:21 CST  Bartholomew Niswonger wrote:
> Hello, I wrote a little while back about not being able to use my
> serial ports, and you all responded very nicely with good advice, but
> it still didnt work.  I finally gave up and bought an internal modem,
> which works like a charm, so I guess it was the serial card, arrghh.
> But thanks very much for the help
> 
> Anyway, I got a ppp link up, and telneted around, works great, fast
> (its a 28.8) and whatnot, but FTP has major trouble.  I get around 
> 270 bytes/sec rather than the 2.7-3.5 Kb/sec I should get (as seen on
> friend's box, and my amiga at times...)  I was wondering if there is a
> fix for this, or if I am doing something wrong.  It seems the biggest
> problem is that FTP waits for 5-10 seconds after each error, and I
> get basically an error/Kb.

A few things to try:

*  Get 16550's (if you don't have them already)
*  Try turning off TCP time stamps (there is a sysctl for it in recent srcs)
*  Disable Compression and error correction (this helped me on noisy lines)

Short of that you can try some patching to com.c.  In 1.0 there was
a case where if you had 16550's and speed on the port set a certain
way, it would only use 4 chars of the FIFO.  I haven't examined 
1.1ALPHA's com.c sources of late, but Charles did a lot of work on it
and may have attended to this.  

Are you getting alot silo overflows?  If so, 16550's and the patch to 
com.c will help.  I have found that on a 486DX33 with IDE disks
16Mb of RAM and 16550's I will still get silo overflows on a fairly regular
basis if the port is being beaten pretty badly (ie ftp over ppd/slip and 
the like).  A 386 may not have sufficent steam with IDE disks...