[lug] transfer rates on 10mb ethernet

[Jeffrey B. Siegal]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> Many "old, ISA" cards aren't very efficient.  300 to 400KB/sec is about
> the best you can see from them.  Just to be canonical, note that a
> 10Mbps network can transfer between 1MBps to 1.2MBps (note the difference
> between "Mb" and "MB").

See my earlier message where I reported an actual test (which was the first
and only test I did after seeing the original message on this thread) showing
700K bytes/sec on a 486-100 with an *ISA* WD8003.  I've seen this same system
do almost 1M bytes/sec occasionally.

The other messages on this thread seem to suggest that the *CPU* is the
primary bottleneck. If you have less than a high end 486 or a lew end Pentium
and are looking to improve network performance the best thing to do is
probably to upgrade the CPU.  There are some cheap CPU upgrades that go into a
486 or "Overdrive(TM)" socket, if you can still find them.

> You can get the RealTek 10/100 PCI cards for practicly nothing these days,
> and they'll give you between 3 to 5MBps.

Of course these old systems don't even have a PCI bus.