Yes, this is all quite interesting.  I've never seen any speeds over 28k
other than the demo FTP with that null-loaded file.  I tried uploading a 2
meg file today and it kept timing out!  Those pauses you mentioned are
what killed my upload tests.

I just recently did an IFCONFIG on my system and noticed some colisions on
eth1, my Sprint connection.  I don't have any colisions or errors on my
local network (eth0) nor loopback.  I can't tell if I have any hardware
conflicts thus far; my two ne2000 cards are plugged in with ISA i/o
addresses at 0x280 and 0x300 respectively.  Don't know if any colisions
could cause my degraded performance.


On Thu, 31 May 2001, Kurt Granroth wrote:

> Steve Holmes wrote:
> > I just got signed up to Sprint Broadband internet service here under the
> > impression I could get high download speeds near 100KBPS.  Unfortunately,
> > I am only getting transfers in the mid twenty's on a good day.  A test at
> > their demo FTP site yielded much higher results but I noticed their test
> > file was a nulls.  I'll bet the fact the file is all the same character
> > might result in "on the fly" data compression.
> > 
> > I haven't yet tried this on a winblows machine yet but all my friends
> > using the service with their winblows are getting speeds much better than
> > me.  I'm wondering if linux needs to be tweaked around a bit to speed up
> > file transfers?  I tried adding a window value on the route command for my
> > network setup but that seems to have no visible results.  
> 
> I've noticed that the download speeds for SBB are *really* variable.
> On average, I seem to get 20-40KBs... but at peak times, it's as low
> as 10.  Every now and then, I get great downloads... the highest I've
> seen is 160KBs.  Just a few minutes ago, I was dl'ing at 140KBs.
> 
> Somebody else mentioned that SBB was reworking Gilbert.. and I can
> second that.  In the past few weeks(months), things have gotten much
> faster.
> 
> However, in the past few months, I get a lot more drop-outs, too.  My
> connection drops for anywhere from a few minutes to over 6 hours.  It
> happens at least weekly and sometimes daily.  It can be more than a
> little irritating when I'm working.
> 
> Upload speeds is bursty and horrible.  If the file is less than a
> couple hundred kilo, then it's pretty fast.  But if gets over 500K,
> then the upload likes to freeze for long periods of time.
> 
> FWIW, I get the exact same tx speeds on Windows and Linux.
>