D-link Gigabit router LAN max speed 300 mb/s?

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Rtstrider

Gawd
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Dec 3, 2004
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I have the D-link wireless gigabit router, and while throwing a file locally to my buddy's pc I am only able to utilze 30% if I'm lucky....I'm running this gigabit network on Cat 5E cable, could it be that I would need cat 6 to enjoy the full capabilities of a gigabit network? Btw we are using onboard gigabit nic's....Any suggestions?

Edit: I've turned off QOS and the Wireless capabilities of this router.
Edit #2: The whole network is wired here.
 
Their is more limiting your throughput then just the network, don't forget you also have the limitations of the buses that the data must travel over (SATA, PCI, etc.)
 
Personally that sounds like pretty good throughput - that comes out at about 35.8MB/s - you would be hard pushed to find many disks (non raid) that could keep up with that for sustained periods of time, let alone mention the limitations of your motherboard bus depending on what other operations are going on.
 
Assuming the network is setup probably (jumbo frames, the works), you're limited by the I/O capabilities of whatever is feeding the network. Like above poster(s) said, you should be happy getting that from SOHO drives that are probably not in RAID.
 
Well my buddies pc is running a striped conifg...If I ran a striped config would that make any speed difference?
 
No, the DGL-4300 has good switch throughput, except for the lack of jumbo frame support, which helps in some cases.

In all cases, when in doubt of switch performance, you can try a direct wire connection. Gigabit makes this even easier by not requiring crossover cables.

To test network performance in isolation of drive and file system, etc., performance, you could use iperf (1.7):

e.g.

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

Rtstrider said:
Well my buddies pc is running a striped conifg...If I ran a striped config would that make any speed difference?
Click to expand...

Probably.
 
Rtstrider said:
I'm not running the DGL-4300, I'm running the DIR-655.
Click to expand...

Great. If you want to contribute to the better understanding of this router and your situation, then run the iperf tests with your best NICs, compare them with direct wire, and post the results. Also confirm jumbo frames support if you can.
 
i did some tests with desktop to desktop, and desktop to an enterprise-level storage server.

i don't think i really ever got over 45MB sustained transfer, from raid0 sata to ide, raid to raid, etc. it would burst to about 60MB, but i never sustained that level.

this was through a couple intel 480T gigabit routing switches, intel nics and storage server.
 
That's too bad. I've sustained over 90 MB/s over SMB and 100 MB/s over FTP using consumer gear.
 
Short answer: You need some luck, overkill on the drive sub-system, overkill on the networking, good CPU and RAM (overkill is good again), and sometimes some tuning of the NICs, OS and file system. The tuning depends on the NICs and OS, etc. Vista changes and simplifies much of the tuning issues.

Overkill: Don't get drives that do say 60 MB/s and expect 60 MB/s over the network. If you're lucky, then in some cases you might get say 55 MB/s over the network, but you'd be better off getting a drive subsystem that can hit say 100 MB/s if you want to do 60 MB/s more often / reliably.

Now, combine that same idea with a network bottleneck, and the problem gets worse -- if you're hitting the ceiling of your network performance, and at the same time hitting the ceiling of your drive system performance, then the combine hits will reduce the overall performance. And this applies on both ends of the transfer.

Some example details on my tests, which are around a year old, so I don't have the same systems or all the details recorded:

4-drive RAID 0 (nearly full) to 3-drive RAID 0 (half-full). Small stripe size; probably 16k on both sides. NTFS. Possibly 64k clusters. Maxtor DM 10 drives.

on-board nVIDIA SATA RAID on both sides; nForce 430 to nForce 3.
on-board nVIDIA GbE NICs. Jumbo frames not used.
unmanaged desktop switch -- probably D-Link DGS-1008D (not recommended for jumbo frames). Possibly Netgear GS608.
CPU X2 3800+ on both sides.
Probably 2 GiB RAM on both sides, possibly 1 GiB on sender.

OS:

Source XP, destination Windows 2000 pro.

Test details:

8.4 GB test file.
xxcopy to transfer and measure, logged on to sender
multiple trials; performance was reproducible.
 
Thanks! However, the only thing that stands out as overkill by today's standards is possibly the 3 and 4 drive RAID arrays. Almost all enthusiasts run at least dual drive RAID-0 arrays and more modern hardware than that. So, either it really is the drive system that is holding people back or (more likely) crappy home networking gear selection.

In terms of the latter, my research shows that if you want decent LAN throughput you can't rely on today's craptastic home routers, you need a good GigE switch that is capable of full line speed switching on all ports and ideally jumbo frames. These are not expensive but the benefits far outweigh the minimal added cost.

Good switch candidates I've come across include:
- Netgear GS108 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122111
- D-Link DGS-2208 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833127082
 
I just ran a couple of tests with a different configuration, this time going through a DGL-4300 router. Here is the capture:

D:\tools>d-link router
'd-link' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

D:\tools>copyit n:\test\test0\10.gb j:\test\test9\

D:\tools>dir n:\test\test0\10.gb
Volume in drive N is nvr533264
Volume Serial Number is 8CBC-EC83

Directory of n:\test\test0

24/08/2006 06:01 PM 10,000,000,000 10.gb
1 File(s) 10,000,000,000 bytes
0 Dir(s) 528,742,416,384 bytes free

D:\tools>time 0<nul
The current time is: 16:37:48.00
Enter the new time:
D:\tools>xcopy /y n:\test\test0\10.gb j:\test\test9\
N:\test\test0\10.gb
1 File(s) copied

D:\tools>time 0<nul
The current time is: 16:39:30.31
Click to expand...

That's 10 GB in 102.31s ~ 97.7 MB/s.

Vista RC1 to 2003 x64 Server, 3-drive NV RAID 5 to 7-drive Broadcom RaidCore RAID 5 on PCI-X. Jumbo frames not used.

Tweaking SMB is a pain, and it seems to me at this time that MS might have crippled XP's file server performance somewhere beyond tweaks. This I think would be the biggest problem faced by XP users once they get over some hardware bottlenecks. A workaround is to use a third-party FTP server such as FileZilla.

I admit though that I've gotten even nicer numbers with jumbo frames, which the DGL-4300 doesn't support. So damn, there goes my theory about jumbo frames. Again.
 
Madwand said:
I just ran a couple of tests with a different configuration, this time going through a DGL-4300 router. Here is the capture:



That's 10 GB in 102.31s ~ 97.7 MB/s.

Vista RC1 to 2003 x64 Server, 3-drive NV RAID 5 to 7-drive Broadcom RaidCore RAID 5 on PCI-X. Jumbo frames not used.

Tweaking SMB is a pain, and it seems to me at this time that MS might have crippled XP's file server performance somewhere beyond tweaks. This I think would be the biggest problem faced by XP users once they get over some hardware bottlenecks. A workaround is to use a third-party FTP server such as FileZilla.

I admit though that I've gotten even nicer numbers with jumbo frames, which the DGL-4300 doesn't support. So damn, there goes my theory about jumbo frames. Again.
Click to expand...

This is awesome... you've got to be happy with this.

Can you elborate more on tweaking SMB?

I'm also interested in your thoughts on Vista in this regard, because that's what I will be running. In fact I'll be running Vista Ultimate x64 on both.

Does the Server OS offer additional performance/tweaking that you can't get on the desktop versions?
 
Just throwing my numbers out there. Friend and i were transfering some stuff using a nic dell gigabit managed switch(dont remember the model). Both had new core2duo computers with normal single sata drives. We had rates of about 50mb/s sustained anytime we transferd files. At that point it was the hard drives holding us back, not the network. Given these were both freshly made machines, no fragmentation ect.
 
virtualrain said:
This is awesome... you've got to be happy with this.

Can you elborate more on tweaking SMB?

I'm also interested in your thoughts on Vista in this regard, because that's what I will be running. In fact I'll be running Vista Ultimate x64 on both.

Does the Server OS offer additional performance/tweaking that you can't get on the desktop versions?
Click to expand...

I couldn't really answer these questions without some more specific testing with multiple Vista installations, and won't have the time for that over the next few days. Maybe afterwards I'll have some more info to share.
 
Madwand said:
I couldn't really answer these questions without some more specific testing with multiple Vista installations, and won't have the time for that over the next few days. Maybe afterwards I'll have some more info to share.
Click to expand...

That would be great.... even if you can share some of the SMB tweaking secrets from XP that would be great.
 
I did a bit more testing, and found that XP x64 and Vista (x32 and x64) also perform well for SMB transfers.

This implies that SMB performance was improved through the line starting with the 2003 code base (which was used to seed XP x64) and Vista, etc.

With Vista as the client, and 2003, XP x64, or Vista as the server, you can potentially saturate gigabit over SMB.
 
Cool... I will definitely look forward to trying it when I get both systems up and running.
 
most harddrives + network overhead = 30 mb/s
unless you run 2x Raptors 74GB 16MB Cache then you might get around 100 mb/s network transfer but still there is network overhead
it also depends on network card, i think Intel has some good networks cards compared to onboards
 
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