[realtek] What throughput can be expected

[Ambrus Michael]

Hi,
I'm having problems getting the throughput up on my recently upgraded home
LAN. The NIC's "non-branded" but PCI based with the RTL8139 chip. I'm
getting roughly 1.2MB/s on a LAN where the two clients used for the tests
are the only ones connected. The machines are P166 and AMD450 based.

I've calculated the statistics simply by transferring large files with (only
a few however) application protocols - NFS and Samba. There seems not to be
a great difference in performance.

The machines are sufficiently strong I think, not to be responsible for
adding bottlenecks in the network layers.

Since I'm quite new to FastEthernet my questions are as follows:
* What throughput can be expected both in general for FastEthernet and
specifically for RTL8139 based NIC's
* Where can I expect to find the bottle-necks (please elaborate if
possible).
* Can anyone supply a wild guess where to look for the problem.
* I'm not using the most up-to-date driver, but I think the one that comes
with RH7.1 should be recent enough?
* Is there a utility for managing the NIC EEPOROM without having to do it
from DOS?
* Can you get 200MB/s full-duplex with a hub-based LAN or do you need a
switch for this?

I would be nice to be able to search among the list archives non-manually.
Hopefully I'm not asking no many annoying questions that have already been
answered many times over or are expected to be common-knowledge :-) 

Regards
Michael Ambrus