use ftp 😀

You can have Gb ethernet, but if the rest of the computer isn't fast enough to deal with it, e.g. due to limitations in the bus speed, then you still won't reach those ideal speeds.

On my retro PCs (when connected to Ethernet and not to WiFi), the bottleneck is usually the drive speed.

keenmaster486 wrote:

On my retro PCs (when connected to Ethernet and not to WiFi), the bottleneck is usually the drive speed.

On MS-DOS, there was the FASTOPEN command. It essentially was some "DIR" cache, which alloewd for faster file opening and directory lisiting.
It was superseeded by SmartDrive, I believe, but maybe it still is useful for networking (if a DOS machine is the server).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet

Maybe use Samba?
Here the retro PC has 100MB 3C905 card, the Linux PC 1GB something Intel Pro, and response is quick, like if the samba share were a HDD.

Also, I'm using FREE-NAS as a host for my files. Its fast, reliable, and most importantly, free. I can constantly get 8-900MB/s out of her. The bottleneck is the clients I have.

To add some background info, the host is a socket AM2 system running Windows 2000. HDD and CPU speed are not bottlenecks, and in fact I tested with the CPU at 2.5GHz or throttled to 1GHz and it made no difference.

I did some more research and found out about a registry key under local_machine/currentcontrolset/services/lanmanserver/parameters

You can add a secret value, unfortunately different pages referred to it as either SizeReqBuf or SizReqBuf. I don't know which is correct so I added both. It controls the size of SMB packets or something, and it defaults to only 4336 on non-Server versions of Windows. On Windows Server it defaults to 16644. I added these values and set them to 16644. Reboot is necessary for it to take effect (there goes my 143 days uptime).

filesystem performance over the network is vastly improved. ^__^

sources:
https://www.brianmadden.com/opinion/Updated-L … kstation-Tuning
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/openspecific … ormance-tuning/

BTW, making it bigger can use more RAM, and if you make it too big it can consume all your kernel memory (which is bad). But I'm fine with this setting with 2GB.

To improve file transfer speeds, you can also enable large packets but you need to do it for all devices. It might also help file listings as well.

bakemono wrote:

... running Windows 2000.

cyclone3d wrote:

To improve file transfer speeds, you can also enable large packets but you need to do it for all devices. It might also help file listings as well.

Yes, the Tcp1323Opts and TcpWindowSize are good registry tweaks, especially for internet connection performance. I already did those a while ago 😀

luckybob wrote:

Also, I'm using FREE-NAS as a host for my files. Its fast, reliable, and most importantly, free. I can constantly get 8-900MB/s out of her. The bottleneck is the clients I have.

I used to use SAMBA on a Debian box, but switching to FreeNAS delivered significant improvements in throughput. I think the SAMBA devs are better at tuning the stack than I am. Definitely recommended!

He still hasn't answered WHY he is using windows 2000. My first home file server used it. I know linux seems hard, and I honestly don't care for it at all, but even I was able to get it to work.

I have a nice 24 drive setup and it honestly wasn't expensive. up to 6 drives could fail right now and my data would be ok. (2 per pool anyway)

luckybob wrote:

He still hasn't answered WHY he is using windows 2000. My first home file server used it. I know linux seems hard, and I honestly don't care for it at all, but even I was able to get it to work.

I have a nice 24 drive setup and it honestly wasn't expensive. up to 6 drives could fail right now and my data would be ok. (2 per pool anyway)

Not trying to be rude here, but OP didn't ask for new OS suggestions. He asked how to speed up what he's got (if possible). Changing the OS entirely would be a major pain.

nor was I. I genuinely wanted to know why. If the answer is something like "I need something special feature X that isn't supported in later OS'es". I'd like to find out.

I honestly think rebuilding and going to freenas would be EASIER than getting 2k optimized.

Because why not? Windows 2000 is a great server OS. It's familiar, stable, and convenient, not to mention guaranteed to be compatible with everything retro PC-related.

Other OS's may be "better", but if Win2K does the job sufficiently, it's a lot more fun, imho.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Because why not? Windows 2000 is a great server OS. It's familiar, stable, and convenient, not to mention guaranteed to be compatible with everything retro PC-related.

Other OS's may be "better", but if Win2K does the job sufficiently, it's a lot more fun, imho.

Windows 2000 was partly NT based, and we all know what "Windows NT" actually means: "Windows? Not There!".
The need to deal with undocumented obscure registry entries is telltale.

I can only second @LuckyBob, FreeBSD (which FreeNAS is based on) is way better in server things.
ZFS, developed by Sun Microsystems, has many advantages that NT users can only dream of: snapshots, checksumming, deduplication, speed, automated hotswap support and much more.

Why Win2k? It's the best Windows, of course! (If you're not sure, just take a look at the EULA for any of the later ones...) Besides, the system wasn't built specifically as a file server. No disk arrays or anything like that. It's more like a sidekick for my main system (also Win2k!).

I'm definitely not 1337 enough for Linux, although I can run an old Ubuntu inside Virtual PC 2004 from Windows 2000 😉

thats a workstation win2k? what is running on the box? have You followed any windows optimization guides on the nets?
edt how much load does a big network transfer cause? how much improvement did the mentioned hack bring?