What am I missing that copying a 1.1GB file from one of my PCs to another over my 100Mbps ethernet network would wind up taking 11 hours?
Isn’t 1.1GB about 1126MB? Shouldn’t that be about 9011Mbits? At 100Mbps, how does that take longer than about 90 seconds?
What am I missing here?
Could be many factors, and yes, you should get much better speed than that.
But nowhere near the theoretical max – there’s overhead all along the way.
What else is on the network? What else is running on either computer? Are you getting retries due to massive errors? Adequate spare RAM on each?
Can you strip each computer’s background programs to barebones, reboot, and see what happens?
Although your network adapter may say you’re connected at 100mbps, you’re probably not getting that kind of throughput. I’d stick a program like DUMeter on your system and track the LAN throughput to see how fast it’s actually going, and then you’ll have your answer.
For what it’s worth though, no, 1.1GB shouldn’t take 11 minutes, never mind 11 hours. Over my Wireless-G at home it takes about 3-5 minutes to copy up to a gig. I’ve got a lot of other wireless traffic in my building though and it tends to interfere from time to time, even if I change the channel.
Are you running Vista? Have you installed SP1 yet? If not, that’s your problem. Vista had some weirdness with copying large files across a network. SP1 fixed it.
Other thoughts, any other programs using bandwidth? Bittorent clients can cause slowdowns if not configured correctly.
I can’t imagine this being the problem. Knead’s internet connection would reduce the bandwidth used by bittorrent to well below 100 Mbps, and bittorrent only causes problems when it’s congesting the network.
One machine’s on WindowsXP SP2, the other is running Ubuntu Linux (7.04).
I’ve measured my throughput before and it came in at about 73Mbps, which is good enough for my normal needs.
Is there a significant difference between the way copy and paste works and the way FTP works? Enough to make it worth the trouble to run an FTP server on my Ubuntu box for times like this?
It may be worth checking for full-duplex/half-duplex mismatches on your Ethernet ports. If the PC thinks it’s HD and the switch thinks it’s FD (or vice versa), it kinda-sorta works for low speed and almost-but-not-quite breaks under higher loads.
Not real sure about the details of copy/paste -v- FTP, especially with linux involved, but it’s a simple matter to set up ftp services on XP.
Another quick check is to bring up the task manager in XP. The last tab should be network performance which will give you a quick look at the throughput you’re getting.
That’s absolutely worth looking in to. Where do I check that?
11 hours for 1.1 gigabytes comes out to about 0.22 megabits per second.
Have you transferred files between these two machines before?
It’s also possible that a bad ethernet cable could be choking the speeds. If you’re using a homemade cable re-check the connections, or if it’s a factory number make sure the cable is intact on both ends and that all pins are in good shape.
That’s actually part of the confusion for me. These are the two machines I transfer files between the most. One is my DVR, the other is the server I store my DVRed TV shows to after I convert them to MPEG. The very same 1.1GB file I was trying to copy last night was created over the network from the first machine onto the second in under 30 minutes.
Well since you say you are “copying and pasting,” does this mean you have one of the drives shared and mounted on the other machine?
If this is the case, the setup and the driver can quite possibly make a difference. So how do you have it set up? Windows drive shared with smbmount on the linux box? Or the other way around?
If you do an ftp from the windows machine to the ubuntu machine I’m pretty sure you’ll see better throughput. Better yet, forget ftp and just use winscp from windows to the linux box, which I’m assuming already handles ssh/scp/sftp.
I’m running smb to share a partition on the Linux box with my Windows network. I access it via my “Network Neighborhood.” I don’t keep a drive letter mapped to it, so I don’t normally think of it as being “mounted,” but I suppose technically that is what I’m doing every time I open that folder.
[del]I’m not familiar with that package, but I’ll look into it.[/del] Looking went quicker than I expected. I don’t really need the security that package offers, but thanks!
I’m not absolutely sure but it wouldn’t surprise me if windows was just accessing the mount in a very dumb way. If you have time, try it the other way around and see if it makes a difference (of course, even if it’s still slow, the problem might still be windows sharing the drive out in a weird way).
It’s not that you would need the security that it offers, it’s just that it saves you the trouble of setting up ftp on the ubuntu box since (was I right?) ssh is already running on it. There should be little performance overhead due to the encryption, if that’s what you’re worried about.
Plus, in the future, if you ever want the machine exposed on the internet, it’s reasonably safe to open up ssh (and therefore sftp/scp) but you will not want ftpd in that situation.
If you mean try opening the Windows folder from the Linux machine, I should have said, I’ve already tried that. That’s actually where I got the 11 hour estimate from, since Windows’ file copy dialogs don’t estimate like that.
Gotcha. Thanks again!
Well, thanks for all the help and advice, everyone. Whatever it was, it appears to have been a temporary glitch. I copied two files of about the same size this morning, and it took about 5 minutes.