Subway Poseidon USB to LAN adapter tests

[mikep]

Hi

With my A1200 Subway clockport USB controller
i recently tested two different USB to LAN adapter.
One is levelone 10/100, the other is Eyetech/Noname 10/100,
both have Pegasus/Pegasus II chipsets.

What really does surprise me, was the extreme slow transfer
rates of these adapters. Both had a transferrate of about
4 to 5 kilobytes/sec .
Is this normal for usb to lan adapters on A1200 subway controller card ?
All tests were made both with AmiTCP4 and MiamiDX.
System is OS3.9, BPPC 603e/210-060/50, BVPPC.

Hope someone does have some hints for me to that subject.

[Crumb]

Although I haven't tested such adapters It may be a good idea to check out that you have set the network to the same mode: full duplex/half duplex 10/100 etc...

I know that Subway may be slow but I don't think that is normal. I would bet that you have your PC in full duplex or half duplex and your miggy in the opposite mode.

[mikep]

Hi, crumb

Indeed, that was one of my first thoughts. But my network
is a 10/100mbit autosensing, fullduplex one, USB_to_LAN COntroller have been configured via Trident in various ways (first AUTONEGOTIATE, then preset with 100Mb FD, then 10Mb FD, the 100Mb HD, then 10Mb HD).
But nothing led to a higher transfer rate, always about 4 to 5 KB/s - curious .

[Chain]

im getting 40-50kB/s on a4000/060 with thylacine card.
slow as hell  :-D

[keropi]

I remember with subway I too was getting 4-5kb/s with a 060/50 csppc... I will test with algorPRO now , I have the same dongle as Chain  :-D

[Gilloo]

mikep wrote:
Hi

With my A1200 Subway clockport USB controller
i recently tested two different USB to LAN adapter.
One is levelone 10/100, the other is Eyetech/Noname 10/100,
both have Pegasus/Pegasus II chipsets.

What really does surprise me, was the extreme slow transfer
rates of these adapters. Both had a transferrate of about
4 to 5 kilobytes/sec .
Is this normal for usb to lan adapters on A1200 subway controller card ?
All tests were made both with AmiTCP4 and MiamiDX.
System is OS3.9, BPPC 603e/210-060/50, BVPPC.

Hope someone does have some hints for me to that subject.

Maybe original A1200 clockport is (very)(too) slow...
Its slowness is not perceived for a mouse, but for a network it is not the same rate...

[platon42]

> What really does surprise me, was the extreme slow transfer
> rates of these adapters. Both had a transferrate of about
4 to 5 kilobytes/sec .

No, that's not normal. Although I didn't test all new drivers on the old Highway and/or Subway cards, I wouldn't see why the driver should perform that bad. On the Algor, I had transfer rates of about 400KB/sec with MiamiDX.

[mikep]

Yesterday evening i did some further testing.
First, tried both LAN adapter with windowsxp -> adapter are ok, transferrates are normal (very high) -> this means the adapter hardware has no defect.

Second, connecting a USB memory stick to the Subway gives a transfer rate of about 410 KB/s, so the clockport itsself is not the bottleneck.

Third, tried PCMCIA-Card 3c589 network with MiamiDX and AmiTCP. All ok, which means TCP/IP-stack is ok, transferrate was about 320 KB/s .

So, perhaps a software problem with the usbpegasus.device ?

Any hints in what i can do to solve this problem are highly welcome .

[mikep]

cmon, no one here who can help, or had the same problem and possibly solved it ??
or give some advice with which tools i can inspect,debug,monitor the network, the usbdevice, ... in order to get hints about the problem ?

Any help would greatly be appreciated

[keropi]

due to lots or work, I could not test the algorPRO, but the subway/kickflash combo had similar extremelly low speed as yours...

[Boot_WB]

Could you test the adapter under MOS? Perhaps the device driver is not fully compatible with the 68K OS.

Have you tried running the tests with WarpOS disabled (just removing the Warp libraries temporarily) to see if it still works fully under 68K only conditions?

[keropi]

as a sidenote, the kickflash/subway combo does not work for me in MOS... the 4000 freezes when I get it online...

[mikep]

sadly i cant test it under MorphOS, because i dont have a MOS installation on my machine, hmmm - i think, should be worth giving it a try. Will report what happens as soon as i get familiar with MOS (never did use it up to now).

Disable WarpOS - ok, will do a test drive and report the results

Thanks

[platon42]

> Any help would greatly be appreciated

Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to refit my subway/highway yet to do some tests.

The very low rate rather sounds to me as if packets get lost or are somehow delayed. Using a raw tcp monitor on both sides of the connection (e.g. MiamiTCPDump) could give some insight what happens there. Also, try ping to see if packets get lost, with varying ping packet sizes.

 

[mikep]

Now i did some further testing:

WarpOS has been completely deinstalled/disabled, so i have now a native 68K environment, but the effects are the same - very low transfer rates.
I monitored the transfer between Amiga and PC by just inspecting the NET LED indicator. Its curious, but as soon as AmiFTP got connected to PC (i do see the welcome message from ftp-server), AmiFTP needs really lot of time to PWD, LIST, CWD into the ftpserver. It really, really takes a very long time to get the filelist (COMMAND ls or LIST).
The NET LED indicator on my USB-LAN adapter shows a strange behaviour - just before a download gets startet (but slow), Amiga tries for about one minute to contact ftp-server, i can see the LED flashing really often (about 50 times) but nothing happens, no answer from PC, then suddenly transfer starts, but very slow.

Sadly, i cant test it with MOS, because the downloadable PoseidonMOS Package from www.platon42.de does not contain the class drivers for USB-LAN adapter.