From: MAILBOX@ZEUS.ICE.NL (Zeus Mailbox)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.novell
Subject: Re: EtherLink III card
Date: 18 Dec 92 18:32:49 GMT
Reply-To: mailbox@zeus.ice.nl
Organization: ETB-Lubbers Nederland B.V.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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> You write:
> $Hi everybody, I got the 3c509 running up to 400Kb/s, our 3c507's or
> $smc elite 16 usually and at 210kb/s.
> $(tested with norton sysinfo 6.01)
>
>    Unfortunately, this is like saying that a 486DX2/50 is about ten
> times faster than a 386DX/25 simply because a small loop of a benchmark
> ran ten times faster.  Norton's network throughput benchmark is as
> flawed as their well-known CPU speed one.  I believe it uses one
> packet size only, which is not even close to typical of network
> usage.  When loading an app, chances are that the server is trying
> to send hundreds of large packets across the wire.  When running a
> batch file, your machine may only grab a few bytes at a time.  When
> getting a directory listing, there will be a huge number of packets,
> half of them maybe around 50-70 bytes and the other half only a
> handful of bytes.  Norton's benchmark will give you the same
> throughput numbers for a machine running NETX as it will for a
> machine running BNETX, though the latter's performance may be 30-50%
> higher than the former's in the real world.
>
>    If you'd like another wholly unrepresentative benchmark, try
> timing how long the following command takes (try it several times):
>
> COPY \SYSTEM\*.* NUL:
>
>    Norton will tell you your throughput for one particular type of
> packets.  The above will tell you your throughput for large numbers
> of large packets (and, in fact, is the recommended way to optimize the
> number of packet burst buffers for BNETX).  Neither will tell you
> the whole story.
>
>    A better one might be to time how long it takes to load a large
> application (e.g. WordPerfect) and have it automatically open a
> typical-size document for you.  Try this several times in a row
> with each card; it will combine several streams of large packets (for
> WP.EXE, and for several bursts of overlay loading) with some
> directory searches and smaller stuff for the file itself.  Or try
> doing a REINDEX of a database in dBASE.  In every case, try it several
> times in a row; depending on how much cache you have on your
> fileserver, the results may get better as you repeat, in which case
> you should wait for them to stabilize.

Hi Stephen, Iam sending this answer to the list because my charon
gateway doesn't handle UUCP 'beng' addressing and you do not seem to
have a fully qualified domain address.
On the subject:
I agree, the norton network si is very limited in its settings
concerning packet-size and so on, but I only gave it as an
indication, no hard benchmark numbering.
Anyway, I will run perform2 or 3 on it to how it handles that.

Greetings...

Henno.




mailbox@zeus.ice.nl (Henno Keers, CNE)                   Zeus mailbox
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