Performance of the Ethenet card

[kris.c]

I am trying to run some tests by puting together two Intel machines with Realtek RTL-8139 NIC's. Is there a way to find out the peak bandwidth offered by this piece of hardware?

[Mario F.]

Well, it says on the box. Assuming your are using good quality CAT-5 cables, you are expected to be able to transfer data up to 100Mbps

[kris.c]

Cool!! I am using CAT5. I have lost the box,actually. I tried to locate the datasheet for this hardware, it spoke of something in the range of 100MBps too.

[mike_g]

If Google is right it said your NIC runs at up to 100mb/s which is pretty standard I guess.

[abachler]

Generalyl, expect about 98% performance. Also 100 Mbps will yield about 10 MBps due to overhead and dropped packets.

This thread shoudl probablye be moved to network/device communications.

[cyberfish]

in case you didn't know, the b here stands for bits, not the more commonly used bytes. 8 bits = 1 byte, therefore, 100Mbps = 12.5MBytes/s

[matsp]

in case you didn't know, the b here stands for bits, not the more commonly used bytes. 8 bits = 1 byte, therefore, 100Mbps = 12.5MBytes/s

And in a real-life situation with two machines next to each other, I got large (10s to 100s of megabytes) file-transfers at around 11-11.5MBytes/s. Smaller file transfers (at least using "scp") gets less reliable because:
1. the timing is in seconds, so the error is often large if the time is less than several seconds.
2. The protocol overhead at start and end of communication is more noticable [this is usually very short packets that require a response before the next packet can be sent - once it gets into the stride of actually sending your file-data, it fires of multiple packets in the sequence and the response usually gets back before it has to start waiting].

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Mats