TR Transfer rates

[Joachim Knecht <joekne@kaiserslautern.netsurf.de>]

Hi,

recently, Paul Norton stated he'd be "interested in hearing what
transfer rates other people get".

Well, here it is:
At my company, I'm running two Linux machines as routers, FTP, DNS,
proxy and file servers. Both are IBM PCs (a 486/66MHz [without(!!) 2nd
level cache] and 12 MB RAM as well as a P133 with 80MB RAM) equipped
with 3COM509 Ethernet and IBM Auto 16/4 ISA Token Ring cards. I have
installed SuSE Linux 5.0 with Kernel 2.0.30.

With the TR cards configured to use 64k of shared RAM, I'm getting
an average transfer rate of about 820 kBytes/second on both machines
(measured with ftp).

Once upon a while, 3COM cards were quite good in an Ethernet
environment, but 3COM's Token Ring cards never caught up with 
the performance of Madge, Olicom or IBM products. Benchmarks published
in German computer mags showed 3COM TR cards having a maximum transfer
rate of 300 kBytes/second - and that's what I think Gary Post ran into.

I'd suggest buying a couple of IBM Auto 16/4 ISA's (or IBM PCI LAN
Streamers / IBM PCI Auto 16/4 cards once somebody releases the Linux
drivers for them...) and throwing away the 3COM crap.

Yours,
Joe Knecht