Transmit timeouts

[tom minchin]

On Tue, Sep 07, 1999 at 05:02:48PM -0500, Jay Freeman (saurik) wrote:
> 
> And I am not even under considerable load (I run a personal server, with two
> people who check their POP mail every now and then, and myself who uses IMAP
> a lot and an occasional single remote X session).  It usually happens when I
> try to copy a large file off using SMB, or when I do something that requires
> a rather large redraw on X.  The network I am on doesn't even get much
> traffic on it either. :(
> 

I found that certain network traffic profiles affect them. For example, I
had 4 identical machines with Linux 2.2.x and eepro100s. In one environment,
a plain 100Mbit switch (Intel) they'll happily plough through gigabytes
of data per day without a blink. Stick the same machines onto an Alteon
Acedirector and they all come apart with the transmitter timeouts. As far
as my limited debugging knowledge went, the eepro100s did not like the
rapidly changing default route and numerous arp changes the Alteon made
when load balancing/health checking the machines.

In the end, since I didn't want to go back to Linux 2.0.x, I gave my
eepro100s to the NT people and put in SMC EpicIIs. These guys slug away
quite happily (lot less interupt usage than the eepro100s).

tom@interact.net.au