Why are my network file transfers so slow?

Energize · 17 Nov 2008 at 01:14

30MB/s off a laptop hard drive capable of over 50MB/s.

BlackAle · 17 Nov 2008 at 02:20

Limited by the performance of your gigabit ethernet possibly? gigabit performance can vary wildly.

Dunks · 17 Nov 2008 at 02:46

Writing lots of small files?

Dogoid · 17 Nov 2008 at 02:48

it also may be limited by the speed of the the destination medium.

Ascendancy · 17 Nov 2008 at 02:53

DunK1 said:
Writing lots of small files?

He's copying 1 30GB file in his screenshot.

Energize · 17 Nov 2008 at 03:05

Dogoid said:
it also may be limited by the speed of the the destination medium.

Write speeds are over 70MB/s for the drive in question.

Superficial · 17 Nov 2008 at 15:49

BlackAle said:
Limited by the performance of your gigabit ethernet possibly? gigabit performance can vary wildly.

this would be my guess also.

No-One · 17 Nov 2008 at 16:56

That's nothing. My transfers over wifi are never more than 1MB/sec even though both machines show a maximum signal.

El_Watcher · 17 Nov 2008 at 17:22

Severely fragmented file maybe.

masterluke · 17 Nov 2008 at 17:44

cabling \ interference issue?

BigBoy · 17 Nov 2008 at 23:38

I would say still the laptop hard drive is the culprit. as performance statistics are normally not the concurrent read/write speeds as long reads slow the drive over time the same with longer wrights.

Mattus · 18 Nov 2008 at 01:14

Probably the hard drive. The transfer rate of a hard drive depends a lot on where the file is physically located on the platter. The drive spins at a constant speed, so data located on the outer edge of the platter moves past the head much more quickly than data on the inner edge. That's why every HD Tach graph you see slopes downwards towards the end of the drive. Entirely possible that the drive can only do 30MB/s on the inner edge.

BlackAle · 18 Nov 2008 at 01:54

I doubt it's either HD, from the speed graph above, you can see it's hitting a bottleneck, i.e the speed is roughly consistent. If it was due to a HD, I'd expect to see more variation.

NathanE · 18 Nov 2008 at 09:30

30MB/sec is about average for a GigE file transfer across a single TCP socket.

Is your other machine Vista as well? If not, then that will limit performance as pre-Vista the TCP stack was not that good with jumbo frames.

philjohn · 18 Nov 2008 at 10:08

disable "remote differential compression"

NathanE · 18 Nov 2008 at 10:32

philjohn said:
disable "remote differential compression"

A myth. This only applies to DFS (distributed file system) in Windows Domains... or other applications that choose to support it.

It is just an API for programs to use if they want. Windows Explorer does not use it.

Energize · 18 Nov 2008 at 14:04

NathanE said:
Is your other machine Vista as well? If not, then that will limit performance as pre-Vista the TCP stack was not that good with jumbo frames.

That could be the reason then, my laptop is running xp. I'll install vista on it and see if it makes a difference.

Energize · 6 Dec 2008 at 17:23

Hmm seems to have resolved itself?

gillywibble · 6 Dec 2008 at 17:29

Mine said 8 days and 15 hours for 30 Gb. Think the hard drive may have been slightly corrupted

IAmATeaf · 6 Dec 2008 at 20:22

Energize said:
Hmm seems to have resolved itself?

But for how long, I've noticed that copying Vista to Vista and Vista to XP is a bit of a lottery TBH.