Re: Not so good pcmcia lan performance

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@sbcglobal.net>]

    "ripley" == ripley  <Nicolas> writes:

    ripley> Today a guy at work ask me to test my pcmcia nic card.  We
    ripley> transfered a big file via NFS.  We watched the
    ripley> "performances" with nload.  The average transfer speed was
    ripley> between 600 and 800 kBit/s.  I tried to transfer the same
    ripley> file from the PC on my desk (less ram and CPU) and we got
    ripley> about 12000KBit/s.

Were you running the same operating system on the desktop? And did you
use exactly the same network cable for both tests?

I would check to see that DMA is enabled on your drive, and use hdparm
to test HD performance. It might even be the major bottleneck (laptop
HDs are much slower than desktops).

Finally, PCMCIA NIC cards are not fast by design if I remember
correctly - they use a 16bit bus that is basically an ISA variant. A
factor of 2 right there might not be a surprise. 

I regularly see 1100 kBits/sec on a PCMCIA wireless card on 4
year old laptop hardware (the limit is my DSL line, this is what I see
when apt-get updating etc.....).

Cheers!
Shyamal