[comp.sys.mac] How fast should the EtherTalk board be?

neil@yc.estec.nl (Neil Dixon) (11/21/89)

We have a Macintosh EtherTalk Interface Card installed in a Mac II.
When using the FTP in NCSA Telnet we only seem to get transfer rates
of approx 4Kb/sec when talking to other machines on our network. File
transfer between all other machines on our network is much faster. Is
this normal, or should I start looking for problems?
-- 
Neil Dixon <neil@yc.estec.nl> UUCP:...!mcvax!esatst!neil, BITNET: NDIXON@ESTEC
Thermal Control & Life Support Division (YC) 
European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC),
Noordwijk, The Netherlands.

bandy@capmkt.COM (Shift Happens) (11/22/89)

neil@yc.estec.nl (Neil Dixon) writes that his Macintosh EtherTalk interface
card in his Mac II is only giving him 4kb/sec transsfer rates with NCSA
Telnet.  He wonders if this is normal.

Unfortunately, it's quite normal.  In addition to your Macintosh being
somewhat slow [no DMA], the EtherTalk card [as of last May, which is the
last time I complained to anyone at Apple about it] doesn't support on-board
buffering, even though they have 16kbytes worth of packet buffers.  

des7f@ra.cs.Virginia.EDU (David Sappington) (11/22/89)

neil@yc.estec.nl (Neil Dixon) states:
> We have a Macintosh EtherTalk Interface Card installed in a Mac II.
> When using the FTP in NCSA Telnet we only seem to get transfer rates
> of approx 4Kb/sec when talking to other machines on our network. File
 
Using a Max IIx with Apple's EtherTalk card running NCSA Telnet 2.3
with the MacTCP driver I get anywhere from 30-70 Kbytes/sec when ftping
from Sun 3/60s.  The upper end occurs when the sun and mac share the
same subnet while the lower end prevails when the machines are routed
across the university's broadband network.
 
The 4Kb/sec is more typical of a Mac communicating across LocalTalk --
I seem to recall a typical xfer speed of 2-8 Kb/sec under such conditions.
 
There are currently two versions of NCSA Telnet (not counting BYU's
additions): one that uses MacTCP and one that uses an older encapsulation
scheme (a.k.a NCSA driver).  I doubt that the latter will be as fast
across EtherNet.  Of course using the NCSA driver is free while MacTCP
is sold through APDA.

You can obtain the latest version(s) of NCSA Telnet via anonymous ftp
from zaphod.ncsa.uiuc.edu (128.174.20.50).

Dave Sappington
Inst. for Parallel Computation
University of Virginia
des7f@virginia.edu
des7f@virginia.bitnet

markw@kinetics.com (Mark Wittenberg) (11/23/89)

From article <375@capmkt.COM>, by bandy@capmkt.COM (Shift Happens):
> neil@yc.estec.nl (Neil Dixon) writes that his Macintosh EtherTalk interface
> card in his Mac II is only giving him 4kb/sec transsfer rates with NCSA
> Telnet.  He wonders if this is normal.
> 
> Unfortunately, it's quite normal.  In addition to your Macintosh being
> somewhat slow [no DMA], the EtherTalk card [as of last May, which is the
> last time I complained to anyone at Apple about it] doesn't support on-board
> buffering, even though they have 16kbytes worth of packet buffers.  

Perhaps normal, but not (to me) acceptable.  Our (Novell/Excelan/Kinetics)
telnet/ftp program (LAN Workplace for the Mac) running over our Ethernet
board (EtherPort II) in binary mode gets 50KB to 95KB per second (bytes,
not bits) on a MacII with a fast disk; you should see at least 15KB to 25KB
on any platform.  I'd like to claim that our board is just that much faster
than Apple's, but I don't think that it's true (we don't have DMA either ...).
I think that it's your NCSA Telnet; that's about the throughput I got when I
first tested it.  To get better throughput:

1. Get the latest version.
2. (Even if you don't get the latest version)  Tune the settable parameters
   in your config file; in particular, set the buffer sizes bigger (try
   4K).
3. Consider buying a supported commercial product.  I know that both ours and
   Intercon's (the commercial version of NCSA) are good; there are probably
   others too (Ungermann-Bass?)

Mark Wittenberg			Voice:		(415) 975-4512
Kinetics/Excelan/Novell, Inc.	Internet:	markw@kinetics.com
1340 Treat Blvd. Suite 500	UUCP:		ucbvax!mtxinu!kinetics!markw
Walnut Creek, CA 94596		AppleLink:	D0927

xdaa374@ut-emx.UUCP (William T. Douglass) (11/24/89)

In article <375@capmkt.COM> bandy@capmkt.COM (Shift Happens) writes:
>neil@yc.estec.nl (Neil Dixon) writes that his Macintosh EtherTalk interface
>card in his Mac II is only giving him 4kb/sec transsfer rates with NCSA
>Telnet.  He wonders if this is normal.
>
>Unfortunately, it's quite normal.  In addition to your Macintosh being

Actually, I wouldn't consider that normal at all.  At least in our situation
(Mac II w/ SE/30 AppleShare server) we get closer to 65kb/sec transfer(1.3MB
file copied in 20 sec.)  Many things can affect this, of course. The NCSA
software may be a bottleneck, as could be the host system.

The EtherTalk board is not the problem.


-- 
Bill Douglass, TCADA

"I dreamed I was to take a test,
 in a Dairy Queen, on another planet."      L. Anderson

rfl@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Bob Loewenstein) (11/26/89)

Using TOPS and a Mac Ethernet card, we transfer 1.4Mbyte files within
a mac program within 10 seconds.