sthaug@nethelp.no: Monday, June 19, 2000 9:25 AM
Actually, my testing shows a falure to utilize even 100baseTX fully. Even in a switched FDX environment (no collisions) I can't achieve line rate without bumping the packet size up. Considering that the smallest box is a quad-CPU SMP machine (550Mhz), I don't think that there is a CPU shortage <grin>.
The your problem probably lies elsewhere. A decent operating system (e.g. FreeBSD) can do line rate on 100baseTX with something along the line of a Pentium-166. Not exactly a very powerful machine by current standards. (And btw this was measured three years ago...)
Steinar, I should have re-caveated, for your benefit. I am not testing with a bazillion-byte file. I am testing with query/response against a RDBMS host. IOW, a typically real-world(tm) practical application. The responses range from 3-50KB, with anomalies out to 100KB. The slow-start algorithm has been identified as the real culprit. Not wanting to carve up all the IP stacks, I bump MTU up to effectively reduce the impact of the slow-start algorithm (which is obsolete in a switched environment anyway, worse than useless). Measurments are taken at the RDBMS host, as well as the client.