On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 15:04:42 +0200, Daniel de Kok <daniel@mindbender.nowhere> wrote:
>A 50% performance boost is pretty unbelievable, don't you think? I guess
>that is what you get looking at the Windows XP task manager.

Not really, box at other end has RAID0, also CPU limited, I suspect
that the Intel pro/100 offloading checksumming made the performance
boost, plus, the target machine is now running l-k 2.6 stable, previous
performance measure with RTL-8239 was when it running 2.4, but that
might be a few percent, not a jump from 50% to 78% 'net usage' on
single large file transfer on a very lightly loaded localnet. Up
until recently I assumed the task manager 'net use' maxed out at
50% for each direction, so seeing it much higher struck me as odd.

To be fair I should have tried both NICs in similar, but I'm not
that fussed over the issue.

Bought pro/100 s/h NIC for Wake on LAN function. Read the datasheet
and bought another for firewall box to localnet link, will pick up a
couple more as I spot them at local computer market.

>packets to a high-end new Tulip NIC based card. The RTL8139 had a
>throughtput of 93MBit, where the Intel NIC had a throughput of 95MBit.
>Pretty good for a 5 year old Intel, compared to a new Realtek NIC.

Fairly close then, the target box I have is pII-350, reiserfs over
RAID0, haven't got around to breaking the RAID and reinstalling yet.
Other things to do, it aint broke, experimental, non-optimal.
>
>The question is how both cards handle lots of different requests from
>different hosts.

That's an issue I don't face, only six boxen up. p233/mmx with 80MB
memory, not hitting swap, firewall, web server, localnet manager,
load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00. Suits me just fine. 98% idle,
streaming audio from Internet, load average peaked 0.06 with pII box
doing rsync for slack-current (nuthin' new today) just now.

--Grant.