Re: i386 home firewall/router/nat bottleneck diagnostics?

[Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios%cs.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 01:57:10PM -0000, yancm%sdf.lonestar.org@localhost 
wrote:

[throughput problem]

> Network cards:
> - to the cable modem I have a realtek 8169SC
>   which uses the re driver. Mode is 1000baseTX.
>   ID as re0... Registers fine with kernel dmesg
>   looks good in ifconfig as well.
> 
> - to the internal network I have a realtek 8139
>   which uses the rtk driver. Mode is 100BaseTX.
>   ID as rtk0... Registers fine with kernel dmesg
>   looks good in ifconfig as well.
> 
> >From inside my firewall, I can only achieve about 5M down / 3M up.
> 
> Any pointers on diagnostics, how-to's (I've read most
> the ones I could find) would be deeply appreciated.
> 
> Is my i386 hardware too slow?
> 
> Please help me obi wan!

I think that 8139 (rtk) is not happy when it has to share its 
interupt line - e.g. machines with lots of PCI slots.

The advice is to get a Real Network Card for the inner network,
too.

Regards,
        -is