On Sun, 11 Jul 1999, Andrew Gillham wrote:

> I wish I had this setup.. :)  Have you tried to use ttcp for this testing?


> >From a NetBSD/i386 (Celeron) to a NetBSD/i386 (PPro200) I get great
> full duplex performance.

I'd be happy for anything over 100KB/second in any duplex.  We do get
1MB/second or so when we use 10baseT cards.

> > we've got 10 164LX rackmount boxes that we are trying to use as a
> > supercompter cluster - they all show the same behavior very consistently.  
> > This makes our cluster worth approximately nothing to us, and it is
> > getting extremely frustrating.
> 
> Bummer, nice hardware though. :-)  The PCI DMA bug mentioned might be
> worth looking into.

Where we can start?  Would Jason have ideas?  It would also be real nice
if someone else running similar hardware could duplicate the problem.

> > Again, any suggestions what we might try would be greatly welcome.  If it
> > comes down to it, I'll ship some of these mothers somewhere if that will
> > help (or work with someone remotely).  Their next stop is pretty much the
> > dumpster.
> 
> Uhmm, #define dumpster ( Andrew's Truck << From SouthWest Michigan)
> :=)

I'm more likely, actually, to dump the motherboards, and see if I can find
intel dual processor boards that can work with slow memory.  I spent more
than $30K buying 1GB apiece for these critters, which is the bulk of my
investment.

> Have you tried any (ahem) other OSes?  If would be interesting to know
> if this is a NetBSD issue. (e.g. other OSes workaround a hardware bug?)

We're trying RH Linux 6.0 now, and due to some interesting installation
problems, have yet tested it.  Hopefully we will tomorrow morning (right
mike?)  We'll also re-install Digital Unix, True Unix, or whatever it is
called today.  I may even install winblows NT and see what it does.

Thanks for the advice, gang... still need to see if someone else is able
to replicate the problem.

Paul

+------------------------------------------------------+
| Paul Anderson           Public Data Queries, Inc.    |
| pha@pdq.com             734-213-4964(W) 994-3734(H)  |
+------------------------------------------------------+