[tulip-bug] Re: Very slow performance with FA310TX

[Wolfgang Walter]

On Sun, Sep 24, 2000 at 10:06:05PM +0000, John William wrote:
> I'm sorry to be cluttering up the list, but I forgot to mention something 
> that might be important. This relates to the speed problems I'm having with 
> my FA310TX under 2.2.17.
> 
> Inbound pings on the PCnet32 or 3Com 3C509 appear to work correctly. If one 
> of the Win98 machines does "ping -l 8192" to the machine it works. No errors 
> appear in /sbin/ifconfig.
> 
> Inbound pings to the FA310TX with any size >4096 gives one frame error per 
> ping packet and the ping is not answered. This does not happen on the other 
> ethernet interfaces.

As it works fine with win I asume that the cabling is ok.

I would say that your your card uses full duplex and the switch only
half duplex or the other way round. Now you wrote that both ends report full
duplex -  and then I don't see how you could get these frame errors.

You should try to force your card or switch into 100Mbit hald-duplex (as the
other side will then use half-duplex, too). Then mesure perfomance. If it is
much better I really think that your full-duplex is not really full-duplex or
the driver does something wrong. If peformance remains bad I would say it's
the driver - if you use the one coming with 2.2.17.

Please try a newer version: 0.92 or higher.

The version in 2.2.17 works very well with dec-chips till 21143 but not very
well with clones.

In 0.92 the whole media selection logic is much improved, and it works with
more clones and cards. On the other hand 0.92 has some bugs which has been
fixed in 2.2.17 (i.e. TX-hangs).


Wolfgang Walter