Idea - load up System Monitor on 98 and watch CPU usage while you transfer files.
Also, maybe I missed it, but are you sure the Win7 machine's network speed is OK? And are you sure the 98 machine is connecting at 100mbps?
wrote:Idea - load up System Monitor on 98 and watch CPU usage while you transfer files.
Also, maybe I missed it, but are you sure the Win7 machine's network speed is OK? And are you sure the 98 machine is connecting at 100mbps?
I will check this out and let you know.
Thanks!
Since you already mentioned that the transfer speeds between your Win 7 desktop and Win 7 laptop give same slow speeds I think it's safe to rule out Win 98 machines for now.
I don't have access to a Win 7 X64 machine right now but using Filezilla FTP client on XP SP3 laptop and Filezilla FTP server on XP SP3 desktop I achieved speeds of ~11,000 kBytes/sec. Asus switch set to 100Mb full duplex. I'm seeing about 90% network utilization which is about right and what you should be seeing using FTP between machines on your LAN.
I will have to try this between Win 7 X64 and my XP laptop to see what I get. I wouldn't worry about USB transfer cables right now since you may have trouble finding 95/98 driver support. Get the FTP to work at proper speeds between your 2 Win 7 machines first.
What I recommend you do in the meantime to rule out that your switch is the culprit is remove the switch from the equation and connect both Win 7 machines directly via ethernet crossover cable - you will manually have to set IP addresses on both machines since there won't be a DHCP server to assign them. I used to do this back in the days to FTP files from laptop to laptop when I didn't have a switch. WSFTP client 16 or 32 bit on one side, Serv-U 2.0 16 or 32 bit on the other.
wrote:Since you already mentioned that the transfer speeds between your Win 7 desktop and Win 7 laptop give same slow speeds I think it's safe to rule out Win 98 machines for now.
He said exactly the opposite:
wrote:Sorry - I got the same slow result from both windows 7 machines to the three Windows 98SE boxes. Windows 7 to Windows 7 = totally fine.
wrote:wrote:Since you already mentioned that the transfer speeds between your Win 7 desktop and Win 7 laptop give same slow speeds I think it's safe to rule out Win 98 machines for now.
He said exactly the opposite:
wrote:Sorry - I got the same slow result from both windows 7 machines to the three Windows 98SE boxes. Windows 7 to Windows 7 = totally fine.
Correct-
Windows 7 Laptop -> Windows 7 Desktop via Wireless N through Router -> OK
Windows 7 Laptop -> Windows 7 Desktop via LAN Port through Router -> OK
Windows 7 Desktop -> Windows 7 Laptop via via Wireless N through Router -> OK
Windows 7 Desktop -> Windows 7 Laptop via LAN Port through Router -> OK
Well that certainly clears things up and indicates the problem is the 98 side. I don't have a Windows 98 PC but I did fire up Windows 98 SE in MS VPC 2004 on the XP SP3 laptop.
Initially downloading the same file from the other XP machine I was getting ~800 kBytes/sec. In Windows 98 network settings I changed the NIC card from autosense to 100BaseTX (which you mentioned you already changed) and downloading the same file I got ~2,000 kBytes/sec. Granted not as good as 11,000 but definitely better than before. I didn't change any other settings in 98 (RWIN, MTU, etc.).
I suspect the culprit is the Microsoft Windows 98 network drivers since you are experiencing the same problem with various hardware. It seems they just weren't meant to handle the traffic loads of today's networks.
wrote:Well that certainly clears things up and indicates the problem is the 98 side. I don't have a Windows 98 PC but I did fire up Windows 98 SE in MS VPC 2004 on the XP SP3 laptop.
Initially downloading the same file from the other XP machine I was getting ~800 kBytes/sec. In Windows 98 network settings I changed the NIC card from autosense to 100BaseTX (which you mentioned you already changed) and downloading the same file I got ~2,000 kBytes/sec. Granted not as good as 11,000 but definitely better than before. I didn't change any other settings in 98 (RWIN, MTU, etc.).
I suspect the culprit is the Microsoft Windows 98 network drivers since you are experiencing the same problem with various hardware. It seems they just weren't meant to handle the traffic loads of today's networks.
I still have to try the Linux Ubuntu Live CD tonight, and perhaps I'll try the crossover cable as well. Frustrating for sure!
As others mentioned you could try a bootable linux distro such as Slax to see if your FTP transfer speeds improve - I don't know if Slax can access Fat32 partitions, maybe someone else here can advise or recommend a suitable bootable linux distro that can.
You can also dual boot Windows 98 and XP. I use to have a Pentium II machine with Windows 98. I bought a secondary hard drive and after installing it I made a backup image of the 98 drive (just in case). I booted the XP install disk and when prompted to install I selected the new hard drive. After it was done the machine would boot to a menu where I would select which OS to boot, Windows 98 or XP.
If it seems like a lot of work that's because it is. If you want to fiddle with legacy stuff prepare to get your hands dirty.
Anyway how much stuff do you need to transfer to your Windows 98 boxes? Even at ~600 kBytes/sec you're talking about 35 Megabytes/Minute or ~2 Gigabytes/hour.
If you've got more than 500 Megabytes to transfer to your Windows 98 boxes it's faster to take the drives out of your 98 machines, put them in the Win 7 boxes, file copy what you need, then put them back. I still do that even to this day when there's just too much stuff to transfer.
wrote:I don't know if Slax can access Fat32 partitions, maybe someone else here can advise or recommend a suitable bootable linux distro that can.
You'd have to look pretty hard to find something that doesn't support FAT32, especially on a Live CD. (NTFS might be a slightly different matter.)
So.... how does 2MB/s sound? That's what I'm getting through the Linux LIVE CD.
Sounds a lot better than the .6 MByte/sec you were getting before. You're still only getting about 17% network utilization though. Since Windows 98 has been eliminated from the equation the bottleneck now appears to be hardware related. Maybe someone else here who has an actual Win 98 machine can share their FTP throughput results.
I don't know how much deeper you want to dig but at least you boosted your FTP transfers more than 3 times. You now have to ask yourself is ~127MBytes/Min fast enough to transfer stuff to my Win 98 boxes or should I spend more time with this just so I can eek out a few more KBytes/sec?
wrote:So.... how does 2MB/s sound? That's what I'm getting through the Linux LIVE CD.
Thats decent enough. I'm getting that speed with SSH from my linux machine too. Though in my case its the CPU what limits the transfer, but I'm fine with it.
Agreed - that works for me. I appreciate all the help everyone!
I came across http://winntfs.com/2011/10/07/slow-file-copy- … -2k8-2k8r2-2k3/ just now, some of which might apply to Windows 7.
Wouldn't help in this case - the article applies to Win 2k8 and newer, doesn't even mention Windows 98 which is where he was having problems. His Windows 7 machines transfer at acceptable speeds.
It seems to be a limitation of the legacy hardware itself since he tried the same PC with linux and was limited to 2MB/s which is probably as fast as it gets for PCs of that era.
I was intrigued by this question, because there used to be so many myths surrounding networking performance. So I did a couple of benchmarks, with different NICs.
I used a Pentium 233MMX with 128MB MB SDRAM (fully cached, CAS2) on a SiS 5597/5598 based PCChips (I know) M571, with a Diamond Viper 330 (NVidia RIVA128, 4MB SGRAM). The hard drive was a Maxtor 20GB 5400RPM unit running UDMA/33 (DMA checkbox checked). The system also has a Creative Labs AWE64 PnP and a Diamond Monster 3D II 12MB. The OS was Windows 98SE US with the latest unofficial service pack 2 installed.
The FTP server was on a modern machine running gigabit ethernet, the smb server was on a modern machine running a Windows NT 4.0 Server virtual machine. Average speed for the FTP could not be reliably measured using simple software I had available, but it was pretty much the max. of gigabit ethernet (more than 100Mbyte/sec.). Average. SMB speed was about 12MB/s.
The machines where connected using a simple Sweex 8 port gigabit switch. There was pretty much no other network traffic on the network.
I used the latest driver for the Intel Pro/100B and AMD PCnet32 PCI, for the 3Com 3C905C-TXM I'm not sure, because the 3Com site is gone.
I did no TCP window size tuning.
Tested cards:
Intel Pro/100+ PCI (SB82558B)
AMD PCnet PCI
3Com 3C905C-TXM
FTP using 3com 3C905C-TXM
FTP using AMD PCnet PCI
FTP using Intel Pro/100+
FTP using Intel Pro/100B on a Celeron 500 for comparison
SMB using 3com 3C905C-TXM
SMB using AMD PCnet PCI
SMB using Intel Pro/100+
If I get around to it I might test an Intel Pro/1000 server NIC and a Realtek RTL8139C.
For now the AMD PCnet PCI wins!
wrote:The FTP server was on a modern machine running gigabit ethernet, the smb server was on a modern machine running a Windows NT 4.0 Server virtual machine. Average speed for the FTP could not be reliably measured using simple software I had available, but it was pretty much the max. of gigabit ethernet (more than 100Mbyte/sec.). Average. SMB speed was about 12MB/s.
Umm I don't know how it's possible to get more than 100MByte/sec with your setup - having GigE on one machine and 100M on the others means your GigE will be running at 100M.
The screenshots for WGET show an average of 3,5 MB/s..it's a little confusing because here in the US the decimal point is used in place of the comma which in other parts of the world it's the reverse. Taken literally 3,5 MB/s translates to three thousand five hundred Megabytes per second which is impossible on GigE.
It does show a 688 MB file being transferred in ~3 minutes 30 seconds. That means about ~210 Megabytes/Min or ~3.5 Megabytes/Sec. which now makes more sense. This appears to be the average speed using Intel Pro/100+ PCI, AMD PCnet PCI and 3Com 3C905C-TXM cards on the same machine. The SMB transfers are in line with the FTP transfers according to the graphs. This means about ~30% network utilization on 100basetx.
When you ran the same test on the celeron machine you doubled your transfer speed to about 7.74 MB/s (~60% network utilization on 100basetx). I ran FTP tests on my modern machines running XP SP3 and I got 11.4 MB/s (~90% utilization 100basetx).
This confirms what I had already suspected - legacy hardware will adversely impact network transfers speeds.
On the other hand 2MB/s is pretty good for legacy hardware. In Windows 95/98 terms that's pretty fast and adequate for that era.
Perhaps I didn't make this part very clear: the average speed of 100+ MiByte/second and 12MiByte/ second where measured with modern machines with gigabit ethernet to get a baseline. I meant to illustrate that the observed speeds where the result of bottlenecks on the old machines, the servers can go much faster. (Also, the 12MiB from the virtual machine is caused by a bottleneck in the virtualization software, because the machine it's on can do more than 80MiByte/s with SMB using the host OS)
The old machine(s) didn't go any faster than about 5.5MiB/s (PCnet) with SMB and 3.5MiB/s with FTP on Win 98 SE. This does however show that speeds above 500kiB/s or 2 MiB/s are possible with an old Pentium MMX system, and that SMB appears to be much faster than FTP (with the FTP client I used). Also, the speed seems to be limited to 5.5 MB/s by CPU capacity and driver/NIC efficiency.
(The theoretical maximum of Fast Ethernet is (100 Mbit/s) ~ 12MiByte/s and the maximum of Gigabit Ethernet is (1 Gbit/s) ~ 120MiByte/s)
can't find the latest 3com driver? you didn't look hard enough!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060314185602/htt … /nic/3c905c.htm
3com got bought out by HP, so all you need to do was find out what the download file names were, and search HP's site!
https://h10145.www1.hp.com/downloads/Software … ctNumber=JF003A
be sure to download both "disks"... the DOS disk will have configuration utils that will change the settings directly on the card and written into NVRAM... it will let you change duplex mode, speed, and also have loopback tests... the 3C905C-TX also by default try to boot using BOOTP because of its built in boot ROM chip... the ONLY DOS util will let you disable that and should be disabled because BOOTP is useless!
While this is not the end-all solution, my method to network from 7 x64 to 98SE is to run Virtual PC 2007 on the Windows 7 machine with Win98SE as the guest OS, with the network all set up on it. Drag and drop transferring 😀
