cmorgan@ooc.uva.nl (Chris Morgan/RIKS) (10/02/90)
Hi, i'm posting this problem since there is absolutely nobody in the Netherlands who has been able to help with it so far (1 year total). The problem is simply this...data transfers initiated from a MacSE take 5, 6, 7 times longer than data transfers initiated on a MacII,cx,ci,fx. My network consists of 4 Sun workstations, 2 PCs and about 25 Macs of varying denomination. Everything is connected to the one Ethernet network which is split up into 4 Ethernet segments using 2 x 8 port multiport repeaters. All Macs are equipped with Kinetics Etherport II,SE cards. When I monitor the data transfers with the Sun UNIX TRAFFIC command I notice something interesting...a MacII to MacII will send the data in what seems to be BURST mode - that is reads the disk, sends continuously for a few seconds and then reads the disk again etc. The SE to SE data transfer traffic looks completely different. Instead of transfering in burst mode I see small peaks seperated by large gaps of nothing. A transfer of about 3MB of data between 2 SEs takes about 5-10 minutes...surely theres something wrong there ??? The communication software that i'm using is TOPS 3.0. My fileserver is a MacIIfx. Can anyone suggest a possible explanation before i'm forced to pay out a huge sum to get the network sniffers in ??? Thanks in advance to anyone who responds, Chris Morgan cmorgan@ooc.uva.nl or morgan@riksnl.uucp