[Soekris] net4801 slow network speeds

[Rainer Ruecker]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 09:03:52AM -0500, 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.
> 
> 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 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?
> 
> 
> Thanks a lot for any help/advice

Maybe you will find some information in this thread

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/openbsd/2005-10/0423.html

In short: You can't expect the full speed of 100Mb/s since the 
interrupt-rate get's to high. (Not every packet will have 1500 bytes
of payload ...)

HTH

Rainer Ruecker