>It's taking all day to ftp my /usr/pkgsrc_distfiles over Ethernet with
>Linksys 10/100 cards at both ends.
>
>Source machine is a tower, Intel D815EEA2 motherboard, the dest machine is
>ThinkPad 380Z. Both run NetBSD 1.5.1. The source machine also is running X,
>specifically KDE2 -- but I am not doing much on it -- except to write this
>e-mail. The dest machine is not runnning X. The ftp seems to hover in the
>neighborhood of 4.10KB/s.
>
>Both ends are Linksys 10/100 cards. The source machine is NetBSD driver fxp0,
>the dest machine is NetBSD driver ne2. They are connected directly together
>via a Cat 5, X-over cable -- no hub or switcher.
>
>Is this a to-be-expected "feature" of ftp, or should I maybe investigate
>something?

FTP is about the most efficient way to copy files across a network 
that I know of. But I'm curious as to why you consider that to be 
such poor performance using cheap NICs. Also, laptops are generally 
slow-performing machines, as they have 5200rpm drives & slower BUSes 
to conserve energy.

You must remember that, unlike drives, network speeds are measured in 
Kilobits per second instead of KiloBytes per second. This means that 
the theoretical maximum speed across 100baseT Ethernet would be 12.5 
KB/s. That would be theoretical, without accounting for any overhead 
in the packets, collisions, or any other anomalies. You should, 
however, check to see what mode your ethernet cards are in using 
ifconfig -a. Also, you can increase the ftp efficiency by upping the 
MTU values, since it will transmit more info within each packet, 
thereby reducing the packet addressing overhead (think of the 
difference between SLIP and CSLIP of a few years back).

Just some thoughts,
Mike
Bikers don't *DO* taglines.