Transfer Speeds PCMCIA CF vs Network.

[nicholas]

smbfs is notoriously slow for file transfers.

The fastest way across the network would be to setup an ftp server on your PC.

[nicholas]

And then use SAMBA on the Amiga?

No, you need an FTP client for that.

http://aminet.net/package/comm/tcp/AmiTradeCenter

[nicholas]

samba works really well on an 060, but I'd not try it with anything less than 030/40mhz

Wired is going to have less latency then wired, and when you are talking about something as chatty as SMB, that will make a difference. My tests show that wired is also 30% faster throughput.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=62222&highlight=a1200+networking+options

FTP is probably the fastest option as it has a lot less CPU overhead.

I find smbfs is really slow on my 060 and on my PowerBook compared to FTP, less than half the speed by comparison.

This is always handy but sometimes chokes on a connection for no apparent reason.

http://aminet.net/package/comm/tcp/FTPMount

[nicholas]

Is this one nice and quick then Nicholas? I was hoping to get a drive mapped as if it was on the actual Amiga, in the same way that SMBFS does, I don't really fancy opening FTP programs and doing it that way, I like Directory Opus, so if a folder pops up on desktop and in Directory Opus I'd be over the moon. I do like stability though and not really a fan of random crashes.
 
My wireless SMBFS connection now seems to be really stable, I've had no crashes with recent testing since I upped the stack to 60000.

Yeah ftp is a lot quicker than smb but FTP Mount isn't a simple program to configure. If you read the docs carefully though you should be fine.

You'll need to install an ftp server on your PC, but I have no idea how to do this on Windows though.

The choking I mentioned was in relation to non-local ftp sites, it's fine over a LAN.

[nicholas]

That's been a great help, thank you all again.
 
I will look into it.
 
You know I barely play any games on this thing, I think I just enjoy making it do things that I never would have been able to back in the day.
 
I mean I had the A500, which was great, but I always wanted the 1200, and a Hard Drive would have been completely out of the question, let alone an 030 50mhz blizzard with 128mb of Ram, not to mention networking of any kind with other devices or going on line.
 
I think it's the tinkering that I enjoy the most and the feeling of achievement when I get something right. It's a big learning curve for me as it's been such a long time. I got well into MS DOS back in the day when I had my first 486. I was always scripting batch files to make good use of memory with different startup options.

I think we are all still here fiddling with Amigas after 20+ years of it because the fiddling part is the best bit.  If it "just worked" it would be a bit boring.  My MorphOS machines are great and they still have a lot of "fiddle factor" but not half as much as the real Amigas do.

[nicholas]

very simple

That's handy to have built in.

[nicholas]

I get little less than 400kb/s when I'm transferrin files from my OS4 machine to my classiscs 040/060, using pcmicia wifi and netfs. I can even run whdload games over the network with my OS4 machine.

Transferring files between classicks is not so fast 20-40kb/s

netfs is NFS for OS4?

[nicholas]

No, it is this http://aminet.net/search?query=netfs and it is build in on Genesis OS3.9

It was little tricky to get it work with OS4 because it requires some folders, NOT a programs from AmiTCP

Oh ok. I get similar speeds between my 060/Roadshow/Deneb/USB Ethernet and my Linux machines with smbfs, same with MorphOS to Linux too.

[nicholas]

Just tried it and FTPMount could not be simpler to setup. Make sure you allow FTP in windows firewall which was where I was going wrong

you just go into the hosts directory of wherever you installed it and add a DIR for the server in there.

in my case ftpuser@192.168.1.114 and ftpuser@x51 both worked.

ftpuser is the user on windows8 I setup with ftp permission. x51 is the name of my computer.

just FYI, It works but seems to have long periods of unresponsiveness worse than anything I'd typically experience with samba.

I've found that happens a lot with remote ftp sites more than local ones. Maybe it doesn't like some ftp server programs as much as others?

I run proftpd on my Linux machines and it works ok. I think you can use it on Windows via Cygwin.

[nicholas]

It seems like after it stalls for a while leaving all of workbench unresponsive then finally comes back and asks for login/password again and works again for a while. Seems like its disconnecting or timing out for whatever reason. There might be some settings I can tweak on either end. I can also try and enable FTP on my mac and see if it works better with that.

I had no trouble connecting to my MBP running 10.8.3 (Haven't been able to try since i upgraded to 10.8.4 as it borked my 3rd party wifi driver and I haven't been bothered to try and fix it yet).

[nicholas]

In my experience, smbfs is only truly awful when connecting to Windows. I have a couple of samba shares on my linux box and my Amiga machines all access them via smbfs. I haven't observed any particularly poor performance (compared to other protocols) over a PCMCIA network interface in either 3.9 or OS4.

I never get more than 350-450 KB/s between MorphOS and Linux with the 68k smbfs over my 54MB/s WLAN.

With FTP I get 2MB/s across the same network to the same machine.

[nicholas]

Well, I'll have to benchmark it properly. Certainly while the A1 still worked, smbfs between that machine and the linux box was close to saturation point on a 100Mb connection. For example, I used to run the SDK on the A1 and compile sources that were actually over the network on the linux machine. Transferring large files would hit 7-8MiB/s no problem.

With PCMCIA on my A1200, the speed is much lower and I don't think I get much more than ~500KiB/s for anything.

It could be a compatibility problem between the 68k smbfs and MorphOS IP stack, not sure, but it's a well known problem on MOS.

One day I might get around to getting smbfs 1.74 to compile for MorphOS to see if it makes any difference.