gabriel rosenkoetter  (gr@eclipsed.net) wrote:

>On Sun, Dec 26, 1999 at 03:40:43PM -0800, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>> The 10 in 10BaseT is the ethernet speed. Your only options for upgrading
>> involve different network cards. :-(
>
>I'm not so sure the original question can't be put in even more a
>negative way, though... is it possible that some network driver is
>causing one to get less than 10 megabits of throughput on some
>particular chipset?
>
>(I know that transfer speeds and bandwidth availability will vary with
>transfer protocols, but what about handling of packets within the eth0
>or similar device driver?)

Well my observations here are totally non-scientific, but in the process 
of replacing my Performa-550 (33Mhz, 68030 w/FPU) with a Sun IPX my 
network connections do seem quite a bit faster.  Both systems are running 
the same configuration of NetBSD. The bytes in the packets are obviously 
being clocked at the speed of the hardware, but the overall rate at which 
packets can be turned around and processed is much faster on the IPX.  So 
I think it depends on where you measure the thruput for the ethernet.

I've also noticed that while fetching files from my NetBSD/mac68k system 
I get much faster file transfers going to my 400Mhz G3 running MacOS than 
I do going to a 120Mhz 603e running MacOS.  Obviously there's a lot of 
overhead in MacOS.  Doing transfers between NetBSD and Windows or other 
NetBSD systems gives me the impression that NetBSD overhead is quite low 
compared to MacOS though.

-bob