OT: Realtek; Was Re: Windoze crash (was Re: Well, I was at Fry's in CA...)

From: Doc <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Sun Jul 6 17:35:00 2003

Jay West wrote:
> The basic gist of the problems was sporadically very very poor throughput,
> then suddenly great throughput. It SEEMED almost like a 10/100 duplex
> mismatch, but it wasn't.

   We had a client who, after spending ~$2000 on a firewall PC,
populated it with $9 Realtek cards. 1 outside interface and 4 inside.
It was running Linux, a v2.4.17 kernel. The thing ran all the internal
interfaces at near saturated levels, and was showing 1.2-2.5 system
loads (up to 2.5 processes waiting on CPU time). They were losing a lot
of packets.

   After I talked them into replacing the Realtek cards with 3Com
3C905s, system load dropped to 0.1-0.6, and no more dropped packets. I
got curious and set up a Win2k testbed with 3 Realteks, and saw the same
behavior under load. You could literally see the CPU load in Task
Manager rise as the network traffic increased.

   They're Win-NICs. It's not a driver issue, it's the way they're
designed.


        Doc
Received on Sun Jul 06 2003 - 17:35:00 BST

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