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October 23, 2009
Network Performance Issues
My network sucks. I'm trying to copy my photos from my laptop onto my home network and it takes aproximately 1 minute and 20 seconds to transfer a 4 MB file. This copy should take less than 1 second, I would think.
"A well designed 100 Mbps ethernet should see throughput in the range of 10 MB/sec maximum. A well designed gigabit ethernet LAN should see throughput in the range of 100 MB/sec."
But if a 4MB file is 4,000,000 bytes (it's close enough...technically it's more..I don't care), then I'm getting 4,000,000 bytes across the network in 60 seconds roughly, so this is 4MB/60sec = 67KBps or 0.07MBps.
Alternately, if we look at bits per second (bps) instead of Bytes per second(BPs), then I'm getting (4,000,000 bytes * 8 bits/byte) / 60 seconds = 533Kbps or 0.5Mbps.
So I'm going to try to figure out what is going on with my miserable network.
First, I disabled the wireless network card on the laptop. Didn't seem to have much impact on the speed. It still takes about 1 minute to transfer a 4 MB file.
Now, I'll turn the wireless on and unplug the ethernet cable and see what impact that has.
Well, what I discovered was that the WD Sharespace was getting a little confused, apparently. When I tried to click on the W: drive, where I have it mapped, it just went into never-never-land. So, I unplugged it and rebooted the WD Sharespace. Then, using the wireless network only, I was able to copy over a group of 10 files (4 MB each), and each file took approximately 10 seconds. So this is an approximate speed of 0.4 MBps, which is markedly better, but still unacceptable.
I'm going to switch back to the LAN cable now that I've rebooted the WD box and see what my speeds look like over the LAN cable at this point.
It takes about 15 seconds to copy each file now, which is odd. It means that my Ethernet LAN connection is demonstrably slower than my wireless connection. This is an approximate speed of 0.27 MBps, which is maddening. Something I've suspected for some time, but not felt like dealing with.
Now, I've switched my ethernet cable from my Linksys router to my MyEssentials 801.11g wireless-router-hub. This way, the WD Sharepoint and the laptop are plugged directly into the same hub. In theory, this should make it faster. Who knows?
This time, I copied 10 files across that are about 4.5 MB each and used the Online Stopwatch to time it. It took 45 seconds to copy 45.5 MB. So, I'm getting right over 1 MB/sec. So, it looks like it's faster, but still about 1/10th the speeds that I should be seeing.
This time, I replaced the old ethernet cable I had been using between the laptop and the router and I was able to transfer 45.7 MB in 17 seconds. So this means my cable was bad and my network speed is 2.63MB/sec which is good enough for me for now. It's not painfully slow any more. My goal wasn't to reach the theoretical speed of the network, it was to copy my files from the laptop to the network. Now, I've fixed the network to operate at speeds that are tolerable. I'm moving on.
Posted by Rob Kiser on October 23, 2009 at 9:26 AM
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