In article <199608051230.MAA04235@gamespot.com> ian writes:
>Which ethernet cards are you using and which ones were running afoul?
>(fbsd & win95)
>
As a slight aside, and for a data point, I am using (at another company :-)
samba to play real-time mpeg video through; the server is an SS1000E with
an HME ethernet card (100-base-T) (actually this is the cute SunSwift card
with 100-base-T and wide scsi on the same single-format Sbus card) and the
W95 machine has (I think) an Intel 100-b-T card (and a custom decoder
card). This will play (at least) 5mbit mpeg-2 streams (with interleaved
full AC3 audio for another half mbit) with no hiccups. (the streams are
recorded on a raid disk set using the wide scsi on the same card...
iozone reports 6.5 or so mbytes read rate (and about 4 write due to the
raid-5 parity stripe) for the scsi+raid combo to the server. Samba is
slow compared to that but still OK.)
The card-buffer overrun problem is famous; with NFS and a 2k buffer card
(like WD/SMC 8003E, etc) you get *NO* throughput unless you mount with
rsize=wsize=1024. (NFS retries the whole 8k chunk so the second packet
will always overrun the card and the whole thing never makes it. This
fails independent of MSS/MTU/MRU.) (this is presuming the server is
typically fast - both Sun4 and SGI normally are plenty fast enough to do
in fbsd machines with WD/SMC8003 cards.)
-- Pete