Gigabit Reviews & Benchmarks

[MikeDub83]

I'm going to upgrade my dorm network to gigabit. However, I have yet to see any reviews or benchmarks on gigabit ethernet hardware. Anyone know of any articles?

 

[JackMDS]

As an example:

Link to: EDIMAX Gigabit Ethernet Adapter.

Link to: Simple Sandra Comparisons (from the above).

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

The benchmark link mirrors my own experience, the writing from the client to the server isn't much faster than 100mbit, which I find personally disappointing, since that's the primary reason I wanted to go to gigabit.

 

[JackMDS]

To clarify the above post.

The card in the review above (which is an example for a good card) does not perform symmetrically speed wise.

While transferring from a Server to a Client (Using FTP) yields 125% gain (x2.25 faster).

Moving large file from a Client computer to a server yield only 20% improvement.

The above card is an example of a Very Good Giga card. There is others that perform client to Server the same as 10/100Mb/sec. cards and only 20% more in server to client transfer.

This seems to be the M.O. of the Giga entry level cards.

In other words do not fantasize on "Speed" while moving from 100Mb/sec. to 1000Mb/sec. is very very very far away from making the "Speed" x10.

 

[JonnyBlaze]

anyone know why it works that way? i wanted gbit too, but only if it were that much faster.

have to do with the pci bus or something??

JBLaze

 

[cmetz]

JonnyBlaze, if you get a gigabit card for $30 and expect that your network performance will be 10x faster, you're bound for disappointment. Under real-world conditions, the PC platform can't really move a gigabit, but a higher-end PC can move more than 100Mb/s. If you think of a gigabit card as "faster than 100Mb/s" your expectations will be much better calibrated. If you can get 200Mb/s in the real world, it's probably still worth the $30 or so you'll pay.

Limitations include:
1. 32 bit 33 MHz PCI bus doesn't have enough real-world bandwidth, has a high interrupt latency, and has contention (Intel's CSA sidesteps some of this)
2. PCs are generally optimized towards CPU performance rather than I/O performance. Contrast with a Sun or SGI box. Even their top-end CPUs are quaint by high-end PC standards, but as a server they smoke a PC.
3. Disk performance usually figures into real-world performance, since you're usually moving files if you care about network performance at the high end. A commodity PC ATA hard drive offers okay but not great performance, and the bus interface leaves much to be desired.
4. Windows? Network performance? You're kidding, right?
5. SMB / CIFS network performance is even more of a joke
6. Even if you fix all this on the server, your client too needs to have good performance

JackMDS, I have not yet had any first hand experience with RealTek's gigabit chips, but their common 10/100 controller (the Rtl8139C) is known for trailing-edge performance, so I'd expect no better from their 10/100/1000. You do say "The above card is an example of a Very Good Giga card" - how has this compared in your lab tests against the BCM5701 (e.g., Netgear GA302T) and the Intel Pro/1000MT or /CT (CSA)?

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

I have Intel gigabit cards in my systems, and I get similar results to the posted benchmarks. I think the SMB protocol overhead is the principal issue, since the file transfer speeds are so different, depending on which side is doing the writing. I got slightly slower speeds with AOpen gigabit cards, they're based on the National Semiconductor chips I believe.

 

[Link19]

Does Gigabit Ethernet give any performance improvement for online activities with a cable connection? I have an onboard Intel Pro 100 Ethernet controller on a Gigabyte motherboard with an Intel 875P chipset. When I view my network bridge status, it reads as 400 Mbps and when I view the 1394 Net Adapter status, it reads as 400 Mbps as well. My LAN connection status reads however as 100 Mbps. How could the Network bridge and the 1394 Ethernet adapter read as 400 Mbps if my Ethernet controller in my PC is an Intel Pro 100 which only supports 100 Mbps. My router is 10/100 as well.

Are the gigabit ethernet controllers that come onboatd with certain modern motherboards perfrom better than buying a add on card that goes into your PCI bus because many of you have been mentioning that a Gigabit Ethernet card maxes out your PCI bus and can't run at full advantage?

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: cmetzJackMDS, I have not yet had any first hand experience with RealTek's gigabit chips, but their common 10/100 controller (the Rtl8139C) is known for trailing-edge performance, so I'd expect no better from their 10/100/1000. You do say "The above card is an example of a Very Good Giga card" - how has this compared in your lab tests against the BCM5701 (e.g., Netgear GA302T) and the Intel Pro/1000MT or /CT (CSA)?

I am not in a Hurry to upgrades systems at the moment. I got few few Giga Cards card and a switch so I can have first hand experience with Giga. My findings are along those of the review and John?s.

I do not have yet enough cards to compare further. So my notion is a combination of personal knowledge and the reports I found on the Internet.

Unlike the Intel and the Edimax cards mention above, the following is an example to a Giga Card that basically perfumes like a Good 100Mb/sec.Card.

http://www.networkstoday.com/reviews.php?op=showcontent&id=10&page=3

It is quite amusing since most of the questions about Giga cards come from Gamers with the mentality of OverClocking Video Cards. They basically want to know whether installing a Giga Card will improve their ?Killing Score?.

 

[JonnyBlaze]

i was wishing for gigabit because i transfer 100's of megs and sometimes gigs to my sons computer more often than i like.

does gigabit over fiber perform any better than over copper??

JB

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

I doubt that gigabit will yield any improvement in performance of a broadband connection, I sure don't see any with my setup. The machines on the 10/100 switch have access and download speeds that are identical to the gigabit connected machines.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

Originally posted by: JonnyBlaze
i was wishing for gigabit because i transfer 100's of megs and sometimes gigs to my sons computer more often than i like. does gigabit over fiber perform any better than over copper?? JB

I can't imagine gigabit fiber would help the SMB overhead issue, which I think is the real problem. I get raw transfers in the 500mbit range with copper, I just can't read/write files nearly that fast over the link...

 

[foshizzle]

JackMDS, do you know what the specs were in the systems they used for those benchmarks, I just skimmed thru them and didn't see anything about that. The reason I ask is that I'm pretty sure that the reason there's only a 125% increase is because the Hard drives are a limiting factor. gunrunner is saying that he gets raw transfers at 500mbit/s, that's most likely because of the PCI bus.

But those benchmarks were saying around 25 mbytes/s(200 mbit/s). That sounds like the hard drive isn't keeping up with the gigabit cards. A hard drive(on a good day) will average about 30 mbytes/s(240 mbit/s). If you include overhead, it seems like the hdd is slowing it down. Unless, of course they were using RAID or SCSI.

BTW, does anyone know if onboard gigabit NIC's can actually come close to gigabit speeds? I heard a while back that some motherboard makers were putting they're gigabit NIC's on their own special bus, that had enough bandwidth to handle them.

 

[Kilrsat]

We have a pair of Dell Precision workstations (Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz, 2GB ddr, 3 scsi drives in raid 0, basically tweaked for speed) with onboard gigabit, and testing our network is my current project of the month.

Sending a file from workstation A to workstation B = 55MB/s
Pulling a file from B to A = 45MB/s
Sending a file from B to A = 50 MB/s
Pulling a file from A to B = 45MB/s

These are the best performers on our network (right now my project is to try and improve some of our other systems).

 

[foshizzle]

^that sounds to be around 400 mbit. So in your configuration, the hard drives should not be the limiting factor, since they should be able to pull just a bit over a gigabit/s. Maybe the onboard NIC is sharing the bandwidth with the PCI bus.

Although don't the Xeon motherboards have a 64bit PCI bus, essentiaily allowing for a few gigabits in bandwidth, assuming the card is 64 bit capable?

 

[Kilrsat]

Originally posted by: foshizzle
^that sounds to be around 400 mbit. So in your configuration, the hard drives should not be the limiting factor, since they should be able to pull just a bit over a gigabit/s. Maybe the onboard NIC is sharing the bandwidth with the PCI bus.

Although don't the Xeon motherboards have a 64bit PCI bus, essentiaily allowing for a few gigabits in bandwidth, assuming the card is 64 bit capable?

They do have a 64bit PCI bus, and one of the things on my list to check is using an Intel Pro/1000 MT server gigabit card in one of the 64bit pci slots to compare to the onboard gigabit port.

Have a pair of the previously mentioned Intel cards, a small 8 port switch (for local testing with 3ft cables), our normal HP ProCurve switch with gigabit modules, and a wide variety of systems from a basic P3-500 with ide drives to the Xeon beasts noted before.

Right now our gigabit enabled systems are normally sitting around 25MB/s transfers, and we just want to see if we can tune to get closer to the 40MB/s mark on more than just the Xeons.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

I'd like to know how to "tweak" systems to get writes to the remote system at anything close to 25mb/sec. I can read from a remote system and write to a local system at 20-25mb/sec, but writes to the remote system are at 10-11mb/sec.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: gunrunnerjohn
I'd like to know how to "tweak" systems to get writes to the remote system at anything close to 25mb/sec. I can read from a remote system and write to a local system at 20-25mb/sec, but writes to the remote system are at 10-11mb/sec.

You mean 20-25MB/sec. and 10-11MB/sec.?

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

Yes, I'm speaking megabytes. With 100mbit connections, I get around 7.5-8MB/sec between machines, both reading and writing. With gigabit, I only get 10-11MB/sec writing to the remote machine, but usually over 20MB/sec reading from the remote machine. I'd like to get the read speed when writing to the remote machine, that's the primary reason for going to gigabit in the first place.

 

[MikeDub83]

Okay, I think we covered network cards pretty well. Seems everyone likes Intel the best. How about switches? Who makes a good one?

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

I hear tell that the $140 SMC 8 port gigabit switch is pretty nice, it supports jumbo packets, which I think it the next logical step in reducing overhead using gigabit networking. I'm thinking of replacing my Edimax 5 port switch with one of the SMC models and turning on jumbo packets to see if that has a positive effect on speeds.

 

[MikeDub83]

I have heard good things about SMC. You can get the 8 port switch or a 5 port switch. I believe they are identical (besides ports). The 5 port you can find for $103.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

Well, if I'm going to spend $103, I'll spend the $140 and get the extra ports. I think I have five gigabit cards kicking around, might as well have a place to plug them all in.

 

[MikeDub83]

Yeah I agree, and at $140 that SMC 8 port is a steal.

I want to do a benchmark to see how going gigabit will help speed up my lan. My primary reason for moving to gigabit is SMB. Therefore, I think I'll use 2 linux machines and use the smbmount utility to mount a network SMB drive. Then I'll sumalate real workd tests using my desktop and server. I'll run five tests:

1.) How fast can FTP transfer a > 500 MB file.
2.) Use SMB and transfer a > 500 MB file.
3.) cat /dev/urandom to a smbmounted drive and see how much data can be transferred in 1 minute.
4.) Download a > 500 MB file from the server to the desktop
5.) Upload a > 500 MB file from the desktop to the server

I'll run a couple different scenarios:

1.) Current 10/100 NICs with a Netgear 10Mbps hub
2.) Current 10/100 NICs with a Linksys 100Mbps switch
3.) Gigabit cards with SMC 1000Mbps switch
4.) Gigabit cards with SMC 1000Mbps switch, Jumbo frames ON.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: MikeDub83
Yeah I agree, and at $140 that SMC 8 port is a steal.

I want to do a benchmark to see how going gigabit will help speed up my lan. My primary reason for moving to gigabit is SMB. Therefore, I think I'll use 2 linux machines and use the smbmount utility to mount a network SMB drive. Then I'll sumalate real workd tests using my desktop and server. I'll run five tests:

1.) How fast can FTP transfer a > 500 MB file.
2.) Use SMB and transfer a > 500 MB file.
3.) cat /dev/urandom to a smbmounted drive and see how much data can be transferred in 1 minute.
4.) Download a > 500 MB file from the server to the desktop
5.) Upload a > 500 MB file from the desktop to the server

I'll run a couple different scenarios:

1.) Current 10/100 NICs with a Netgear 10Mbps hub
2.) Current 10/100 NICs with a Linksys 100Mbps switch
3.) Gigabit cards with SMC 1000Mbps switch
4.) Gigabit cards with SMC 1000Mbps switch, Jumbo frames ON.

Will be very nice if let us know what the outcome is?:beer: