X-Surf 100 - Best TCP/IP for Speed?

[olsen]

Tried the AmiTCP.config file from the archive and it only got me to 60,000 cps.

That should have made a difference. But, well, it's not the change that I would have expected. Bummer.

Also set up AmiTCP with the suggested DNS server, no difference.

I don't know how this works with AmiTCP, but I'd suggest you have a look at what the TCP/IP stacks says to how many errors cropped up during the transmission. On a Unix system that would be done through a shell command called "netstat", e.g. "netstat -s".

The only things I can think of is:
1.  When I download the update via easynet, is seems extremely fast.  Best guess at least 250000 cps.
2.  I haven't changed my router away from road runner dns yet.  Maybe it is conflicting with amitcp settings and the opendns.

If you select a specific DNS server pair in AmiTCP then this is what will be used, regardless of what the router wants to use. Your ISP may or may not manipulate outbound DNS queries and the corresponding results. It's technically possible, and if you're living in the UK, it might actually happen.

3.  Raw copies accross network seem much faster.  For downloading from aminet, Miami is 4 times faster (again pointing to DNS)

No, this probably isn't it. DNS has one responsibility only, and that's mapping human-readable names such as "www.amiga.org" to IP addresses, such as 50.87.149.192 (and the other way round, too).

Your networking application software (ftp client, IRC client, web browser) will start by querying the IP address associated with a name, and once it knows the answer, will proceed to open a connection to the IP address.

Once the connection is up, the web server or ftp client can start transmitting data. At this point your choice of DNS server is probably completely irrelevant for the performance of the data transmission. "Probably" because in certain cases network services may be used to pick the closest available server, based upon where your DNS query originated. This is how, for example, content distribution networks (e.g. Akamai) may optimize delivery. If you're unlucky, you might end up getting the IP address of a server which is not optimal for your place in the internet.

What else could be slowing things down? If you're sharing the internet link with somebody else, it could be this person's network traffic getting in the way. If you live in (sort of) a backwater town (like I do), it could be the poor quality of the broadband connection which due to signal attenuation restricts how fast you can go. In my case, on a bad day I've got 6.5 MBits/s (downstream), and on a good day it's 9 MBits/s (both are pretty far from the advertized 15 MBits/s). Finally, your ISP could be limiting your traffic on purpose.

Do I need to change my router over also or can amitcp access a different dns with out issues?

Whatever you set up in AmiTCP counts. Unless your ISP filters the DNS packets which pass through your network and chooses to alter it.

[LoadWB]

If you select a specific DNS server pair in AmiTCP then this is what will be used, regardless of what the router wants to use. Your ISP may or may not manipulate outbound DNS queries and the corresponding results. It's technically possible, and if you're living in the UK, it might actually happen.

I have actually come across some routers which defy this rule.  Some older Engenius routers (I stopped using the damned things, so I cannot speak about newer units,) some Belkin, and a couple of D-Links were culprits in breaking Windows Server DNS services.  I was able to show that the routers were intercepting DNS packets.  I some cases the inbound was blocked, forcing the server to use the router for DNS.  In other cases, outbound DNS packets were being usurped, and this caused huge issues with EDNS queries as none of these routers support EDNS so queries would be delayed, broken in sequence, or in most testing simply dropped.

It's easier to tell what's happening with your queries if you have access to an outside DNS server's logs.  But it's not impossible otherwise.

[freqmax]

What do you have in mind, specifically?

 * Option for DMA and various memory setups + bus types (zorro/pci)
 * Proper handling of promiscuous and multicast modes
 * Orthogonal command set. No "S2_MISC" + "EXTRAS_PROMISC" etc..
 * Options for offloading checksum calculations and verifying checksums
 * Support for all AmigaOS versions
 * Option for PPC/ARM/x86
 * Hardware agnostic as possible
 * Backwards compatible with AS225, SANA-II, MNI if possible (so one can use a network card with SANA-II driver with an application that requires MNI etc)

[olsen]

I have actually come across some routers which defy this rule.  Some older Engenius routers (I stopped using the damned things, so I cannot speak about newer units,) some Belkin, and a couple of D-Links were culprits in breaking Windows Server DNS services.

Now that really sounds scary.

I'm surprised that anybody would be so reckless as to muck with DNS queries within a gateway router. There's little to be gained, but it doesn't take much and possibly the most important service your local network needs will suffer from it.

DNS is surprisingly brittle. Let's say you have three DNS servers in your network for redundancy, in case one of them should fail. The way you set up the client computers which rely upon the DNS services is to enter the IP addresses of the DNS servers in a configuration file. Problem is, the DNS queries are usually made in exactly the order you entered them.

If the first server should become unavailable, the query will time out and the next server will be used. Because so many services which perform DNS queries do not cache the results, having the query time out because of a failed server will mean that they will repeat the queries over and over again. Net effect: the entire client network will become stuck because the first DNS server became unavailable. How do you avoid that? I'm not sure that this is a solved problem

Anyway, so far I've been lucky with my choice of gateway routers at home, and even rolled my own OpenBSD-based firewall/PPPoE solution when the old gateway router I was using at the time failed.

I don't know about the Belkin gear, but I know of at least one D-Link router which we ended up replacing at my company. I wouldn't buy one of these again. Same goes for Linksys gear.

I used to use NetGear and ZyXEL gateway routers, which at least 4-6 years ago used to be quite decent. The German-made Fritz!Box routers (don't laugh, it's the actual brand name), which run on Linux are very decent, too.

I was able to show that the routers were intercepting DNS packets.  I some cases the inbound was blocked, forcing the server to use the router for DNS.  In other cases, outbound DNS packets were being usurped, and this caused huge issues with EDNS queries as none of these routers support EDNS so queries would be delayed, broken in sequence, or in most testing simply dropped.

It's easier to tell what's happening with your queries if you have access to an outside DNS server's logs.  But it's not impossible otherwise.

True horror stories... You have to be able to trust your gateway router to do what it's supposed to. Kudos for actually proving what was going on. That must have been a real nightmare, both figuring out that the router was up to no good, and finding a remedy for the problem (before tossing out the gear, I suppose).

[freqmax]

You can't trust propietary stuff. Add to the mix the mandatory US goverment mandated backdoor.

[olsen]

You can't trust propietary stuff. Add to the mix the mandatory US goverment mandated backdoor.

Not sure if there is such a thing.

From what I gather, in most cases it would be unnecessary because the lack of robust security in the firmware is a perfectly adequate substitute which also provides for convenient plausible deniability: hey, that was a bug/typo/manufacturing test.

Getting a useful backdoor into the code which is not easily discovered or used by other people who are up to no good (poster child: wiretapping functionality in Ericsson switches used by Vodafone in Greece enabled and used by persons unknown; discovered by accident in 2006) is difficult. The complexity of the task will almost inevitably lead to the backdoor being discovered.

[freqmax]

Case in point: If you can't inspect it - you can't trust it.

[matt3k]

@Olsen

Installed Roadshow Demo.

Wow, wow, wow, and wow.  350,000 cps peek and always above 300,000.

Ok, so now I need to test smb shares on the nas and samba.  Assuming those work, and you have yourself another customer.  Don't know what Easynet is having trouble with but, it simply will not perform, was just going to use Miami and hang out at 200,000.  Not any more, your product screams...

[olsen]

@Olsen

Installed Roadshow Demo.

Wow, wow, wow, and wow.  350,000 cps peek and always above 300,000.

Would that be local network traffic or internet traffic?

I still think that this figure is too low for the X-Surf 100.

I can get that much out of plain Ariadne on a foggy day with drizzle and light snow (in fact, in my tests Roadshow squeezes as much out of the Ariadne as you possibly could expect from a 10 MBit/s Ethernet card: more than 900,000 bytes per second).

The X-Surf 100 should peak somewhere above 2.2 MBytes per second, and unless your internet connection is very poor in terms of throughput, you should be able to get at least 1.5 MBytes per second downstream traffic out of it, probably more.

Ok, so now I need to test smb shares on the nas and samba.  Assuming those work, and you have yourself another customer.  Don't know what Easynet is having trouble with but, it simply will not perform, was just going to use Miami and hang out at 200,000.  Not any more, your product screams...

Well... I still think there's something fishy going on. It's nice to read that Roadshow performs better for you than both Miami and AmiTCP do under the same circumstances, but the throughput figures are far from what the X-Surf 100 is capable of.

Incidentally, the Roadshow "DEVS:Internet/servers" contains ready-made entries for smbd and nmbd, which are commented out. If you have everything installed in Samba:, then everything you need to do in order to give Samba a spin is to remove the leading '#' characters in the last three lines of the file.

[matt3k]

Would that be local network traffic or internet traffic?

Internet - downloading from Aminet with Ibrowse reporting the cps.  Was only getting 155,000 constant from the Ariandne, so doubling was a good test for me.

I have yet to test locally across my network, I will look up the test you recommended earlier.  Would you tell me exactly what your test is so I can simulate it?  

Copying across my LAN with Roadshow sucks all the life out of my cpu , So I hope to see some large numbers (At least the music doesn't skip, but she doesn't have anything left over).  I have a gigabit network with Cat 5e factory crimpled, so I should be decent speed here...

Can't understand what is fishy with EasyNet either, so if we can make roadshow work I'll go with you and support your efforts...

Thanks again for all the help and patience.

[matt3k]

Did a bit more work to test it properly.

Switched to FTP using my NAS in my LAN.

Much different story.

Miami with SANA -  900,000 cps
Roadshow demo - 1,200,000 cps
EasyNet -          -1,500,000 cps

Seem like with FTP EasyNet is the fastest.

That still seems slow for a 100mb NIC in a Lan.  

Easynet has to have some issues, perhaps it is in the dns setup.  It is a bit convoluted to my thinking.  

Any ideas???

[freqmax]

Memory access and CPU cycles can also limit these things.

[olsen]

Did a bit more work to test it properly.

Switched to FTP using my NAS in my LAN.

Much different story.

Miami with SANA -  900,000 cps
Roadshow demo - 1,200,000 cps
EasyNet -          -1,500,000 cps

Seem like with FTP EasyNet is the fastest.

Out of the box Roadshow is configured to use resources conservatively, like it used to be back in 1995 when the 4.4BSD TCP/IP stack was released which Roadshow is based upon.

You can tweak the performance further if you would want to. Ask me how :-)

That still seems slow for a 100mb NIC in a Lan.  

Yes and no.

No, because your Amiga's CPU has to do most of the heavy lifting when moving data between the network and your computer. This causes so much load that the amount of data that can be transferred will be limited by it. This is one reason why the 100 MBit/s NIC will only deliver a fraction of the theoretical bandwidth possible.

Yes, because you are still below the 2 MByte/s which the X-Surf 100 should be able to deliver on your system (provided that you have proper Cat 5 cabling, an Ethernet switch which is fast enough, supports bidirectional traffic, and the server you are testing with can send/receive data fast enough).

Easynet has to have some issues, perhaps it is in the dns setup.  It is a bit convoluted to my thinking.  

Any ideas???

Even if the DNS setup may look convoluted (I have no idea if it does; I never used EasyNet), it is unlikely to be the reason why the available network speed is not as high as expected.

The DNS servers configured are typically consulted once before a connection is established, and once the connection has been established, and data is being exchanged, the DNS server configuration is completely irrelevant.

Picture it like this: DNS is like a map you consult at the beginning of a road trip. You figure out where you want to go (and maybe take notes). While you are on the road, you will follow the route suggested by the map. And while you are traveling to your destination, it no longer matters how long you looked at the map, how many times you looked at it, or if you checked several maps instead of just one. What matters is the distance you need to travel, and possibly if there is construction work, detours, or if you run out of gas.

[matt3k]

Man this site is terrible lately.  It took me 7 times of logging in to get here...

@Olsen

Please share the speed tweaks for Roadshow!  I already greatly increased the buffers.  If I get it to perform beyond or even the same as EasyNet, I will pick it up.

Thanks for the great information.  I going to conduct some more tests to make sure something isn't wrong in my network.  I need to rule out every possible other component to point blame at the X-Surf or the TCP/IP stack.

My gut tells me that is where the issue is, but I need to prove it.

[matt3k]

Follow up.

Tried FTP - NAS to my Windows PC and easily hits 20mb/s.

This is definitely an issue with my system, the card or the stack.

The best I can get with Easynet and FTP is 41Kbyte/s.

I connected my amiga to the nas on the same switch and disconnected everything else, just to make sure.

I'm willing to tinker more if anyone has ideas???

Matt

[freqmax]

20 Mbit/s on a local LAN seems slow.