[Soekris] net4801 slow network speeds

[Andy Michaels]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Mail Lists wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I thought I'd ask here first.
>
> I recently bought a couple of soekris net4801s and installed openbsd  on
> them. During the course of the installing (copying files back and forth,
> etc), I noticed that scps seemed to be taking overly long. I figured it was
> probably because it was writing to CF, so curious I mount a couple nfs
> shares and crudely timed a file copy between them.. It turns out a 50MB
> files takes almost 1 minute and thirty seconds to copy between the shares.
>

try using iperf on your endpoints.  I use it to baseline all my network
links.  It basically eliminates the disks (or CF cards) as bottlenecks,
since it's doing transfers from memory.  You should see the best
performance here.  This is how I discovered that my disks were causing me
such slowness.

http://www.noc.ucf.edu/Tools/Iperf/default.htm

> I'm probably thinking about this wrong but that gives me somewhere in the
> range of 4Mbit/s (or 8full duplex?)
>
> Is this the kind of performance I should expect to see out of the 4801? If
> so I have to say I'm a little disappointed.
>

I don't think it should be that slow.

> I just thought someone here might know if there was an issue - or OS
> parameters to set...
>
> It's running the 1.28 firmware and openbsd4.0
>
> I've tried swapping out cables, putting it on different network segments,
> etc.
> I also don't THINK it's a processing issue.. the cpu show 88% idle during
> the copy
>
> I realize that copying files across nfs might not be the best way to test
> something like this. Perhaps someone could suggest an alternative that would
> give a better measure of actual performance?
>

you might try the transfer via normal ftp or something else that doesn't 
hit the openssl libraries and see if there's a difference.

>
> Thanks a lot for any help/advice
>