Manuel Bouyer writes:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 12:34:36PM +0100, Mark White wrote:
> > I'm having fairly regular problems with transfer speed, and
> > wondered if anybody could suggest anything I could try.
> > 
> > I have a small network with two NetBSD/i386 installs (a
> > Duron with 2.0_BETA "mirkwood" and an elderly Pentium with
> > 1.6 doing firewall duties "lorien"), plus a few macs.  Both
> > i386s have Sundance ST-201 NICs, all on a Netgear FS108.
> 
> I tried to get those adapters work properly at one time (I even
> downloaded the datasheet for them). Unfortunably these NICs have a
> very small amount of on-board buffer (2k), which means it will loose
> packets if there are other activities on the PCI bus.

Ok, noted; I'd seen a few recommendations for these, but not
investigated the hardware much.  The actual cards are D-link
DFE-550TXs, by the way, with the ste(4) driver.  Could a
dropped packet cause a second or so wait in the stream?

However, I've seen the same problem on this machine with a
vr(4) device (VIA Rhine chipset on some other D-link).  Plus
at a given moment it doesn't seem to effect communication 
with other machines on the network...

Mark <><