Saturday, November 15, 2003

Windows 2000 TCP Performance Tuning Tips

I'm currently troubleshooting some network performance problems. You would think, that with a 100Mbps hub, where only 2 Windows 2000 servers are talking to each other, I'd get throughput of over 5 megabytes/sec. Instead, I'm getting anywhere from 0.5 to 2.0 megabytes/sec.

Most likely, I need to give in and upgrade to an 8-port switch instead of trying to use an 8-port hub. Gigabit switches (8-port, workgroup, unmanaged, 10/100/1000) are now below $200. Server-class gigabit NICs are now down around $135.

Windows 2000 TCP Performance Tuning Tips - Now, I tried doing what they recommended (increasing the window size to 128Kb), but it really hasn't made any difference. Gonna pull those settings back out.

Well, I just remembered that the 4-port LinkSys router is a switch (I normally use a 8-port hub that is slaved to it), so I've put both of the boxes on the switch and I'm going to see what happens with performance. Both servers have 3C905B cards running at 100Mbps. Hmmm, no effect, still getting 0.6 Megabytes/sec (doing a sequential write to a file on the other server).

posted by Wuphon's at 9:47 PM