What is the reasonable performance of a home 10mbps LAN

[minxu@sci.ccny.cuny.edu]

Hi, there:

I have just bought another new computer and built a home LAN using two 10mbps 
NE2000-pci cards and a hub. It turns to be that the transfer speed between the 
two computer varies dramatically.

Sometimes, it can reach 8mbps for few seconds, and then it slows to about 
600kbps or even lower. It may touch 20kbps bottom line. Excessive collision is 
reported from the hub. And transfer error and receive error can be found by
ifconfig. See:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 52:54:00:E4:2C:8D  
          inet addr:192.168.14.1  Bcast:192.168.14.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:968323 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:15265
          TX packets:913478 errors:3279 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:3280
          collisions:59186 txqueuelen:100 
          Interrupt:9 Base address:0x6400 


I wonder whether it is what I should get with my systems.
     
A: Debian unstable with kernel 2.2.10  200Mhz MMX 64M RAM 
   rtl8029 NIC card using the ne2k-pci driver
 
B: K6-2 400Mhz window98 64M RAM
   rtl8029 driver coming with microsoft

Any help is appreciated.

-- 
Min Xu				
City College of NY, CUNY		
Email:	mxu1@email.gc.cuny.edu
       	minxu@sci.ccny.cuny.edu	 
Tel:	(O) (212) 650-6865
	(O) (212) 650-5046
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