XP network performance tuning

[Farnk]

Hey peeps,

Question for the l337 out there.

I've got three xp machines, all with sp1, 100meg lan cards, all talking through a fast switch to each other. All the cards are set to 100/full duplex, but I only get between 1-3 % of network utilization at best.

Ping times are all <1ms, yet file copies across the lan are crap. :mad:

All machines get IP addresses from my router, there's no other protocols enabled, and I've added the TcpWindowSize reg key to all the pc's. (as per microsoft's recommendation)

And Ideas?

[thingy]

So you've manually set the TCP window size, you're forced it to 100mbps and full duplex. Cat5e / Cat6 cables I assume? Do they run alongside/over any power cables? Plugs/ports still in good condition? What kind of quality switch do you have? What else shares the PCI bus that the network card uses? (ie, disk controllers etc).

Those are some of the easier things to look at.

[Coolcan2]

agreed.

also you might want to set up a ftp or an apache http server to see if windows is your problem, i personally don't like the windows file Transfer protocol. Also check to see if you have QoS packet scheduler on, it reserves 10% of your bandwidth for QoS enabled apps, which at the present time really do not exist.

[Farnk]

Hey there,

Thanks for the tips, current state of play..

Switch is a HP procurve 2524, QOS is gone.
I set up a linux box and saw throughput up to 10% from the xp box during a large file copy. I'm not sure that the NIC in the linux box is operating at 100mb tho, still looking into that.

So up to 10% from 2-3% better but still slow for the larger stuff.

I'm trying to get some reasonable throughput as I've scored a nice compaq drive array and smart raid controller out of a proliant ML370 that bit the dust. The idea is to have a central file store for the pc's on the LAN that I can backup on a semi regular basis.

[Coolcan2]

what kind of cabling? cat5e? cat6? are both network cards 100 megabit? also try monitering your bandwidth. what windows thinks is 10% is how many kilobits?
What kind of hdds? cache size? rpm? how are they connected? ata, ide, or scsi?

slow for large stuff? how slow for a how large file?

[Farnk]

Hey there..

Cat 6 cabling, all 100mb cards, switch senses them as 100mb.
Drives are all 7200 rpm, 2Mb cache seagate ATA's.

Windows seems to think that there's 100mb of bandwidth to play with.
It did work much better prior to some recentish system rebuilds (same build of XP), I'm thinking that something in SP1 or another update must have had some affect.

It's only recently that I've been moving large files about, as I'm trying to centralise data onto the raid array.

Throughput to the linux box is better, and after some more investigation, it looks like the nic driver has it set to 10mb on that pc, so I'm still suspicious of windows.

Next try is to rebuild one of the machines with just a plain vanilla XP install and see what happens. If I don't get any joy with that, I'll put the raid array onto the linux box and leave it at that.

Thanks for your suggestions..

[jasebert]

Silly question, but check out your network & dial-up connections. You have have in there the LAN connection and then you have have a 1394 network connection. Can you try and disable all other network connections other than the LAN connection if you see those options. Also have you got any network bridges on any of the XP boxes? If so, try and disolve them.

Just to confirm, if you are copying large files to a central server, maybe check the disk read/writes on the server to see what they are coming up as.

What happens when you copy files from one PC to another (excluding the server)? Same issue?