OT: Effective Speed of 10BaseT

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Sun Nov 14 16:07:58 1999

pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com (Pete Turnbull) wrote:
> But are you running over 10baseT (or 10base2) all the way? Zane's system
> might take a fair performance hit because either the hub or the switch is
> buffering every packet and retransmitting it.

Shouldn't matter on FTP connections, which use TCP. TCP is a windowing
protocol designed to accomodate high-latency links without wasting
bandwidth.

On the other hand, I think he said he was using AppleTalk. AFAIK, the
only AppleTalk protocol that does similar windowing is ADSP (AppleTalk
Data Stream Protocol), and it doesn't do nearly as good a job of it as
TCP. And there aren't very many higher-level services that rely on ADSP;
most things (including the AppleShare File Servers) use ATP (AppleTalk
Transaction Protocol) which is for all intents and purposes *designed* for
poor performance.

Typically the real reason you can't get maximum utilization of a fast
network connection for file transfers has NOTHING to do with the network
performance. Usually it's a matter of the performance of the file system.
Received on Sun Nov 14 1999 - 16:07:58 GMT