VOGONS


First post, by WildW

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Hi folks - I wonder if you have any advice for an odd issue. Pentium III 450MHz machine with Windows 98SE, 256MB ram, 80GB IDE hard disk and 3Com 3c905c-tx 10/100 PCI network card. I was copying files over to this PC from my modern machine and noticed that the transfers were really slow. Transfer of even a single large file goes no faster than 1.5 MB per second at the most according to the Windows 10 source machine, and the time it takes seems to confirm that figure is about right. Copying from the P3 to the modern machine I see 3MB per second, suggesting that writing on the P3 machine is part of the issue, but perhaps not all of it.

I've tried some basic things - swapping out the network cable made no difference. I ran a benchmark on the hard disk and for larger writes it's capable of writing 10 to 20 MB per second. The network card is the only PCI card in the machine, so I don't think it's a bus bandwidth limitation. PCI should be capable of up to 133MB per second, right? I do have a different network card I could try but haven't done so yet.

Where's the bottleneck likely to be? Am I expecting too much of this machine and/or OS?

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Reply 2 of 38, by derSammler

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With a 10/100 PCI network card, you are limited to 1.25 MB/s (when connected with 10 mbit/s) or 12.5 MB/s (when connected with 100 mbit/s). This is the raw bandwidth and does not account for any overhead. In reality, you can't get much more than 80% of that. So given that you have a 100 mbit/s connection, this would be 10 MB/s. But Windows 9x is very, very bad when it comes to networking. It's just not fast. Even Windows NT and Server was often criticized for that, it simply can't make full use of the bandwidth.

You can check if you can enable DMA for the 3Com card in the device manager, if not already enabled. And use the 3Com driver for the card. But apart from that, there's not much you can do to speed up networking in Win9x.

Reply 3 of 38, by WildW

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Hard disk has DMA checkbox enabled...I'm sure there used to be somewhere in Windows 98's Device Manager that would tell your the current UDMA or PIO mode on each drive, but I can't seem to find it now. The benchmark numbers do feel pretty slow, but I don't remember quite how fast drives were back then. This 80GB drive is at least a few years newer than the rest of this machine though.

The NIC seems to have the offical 3Com driver installed, no settings to tweak in there though.

I'm not sure how to see CPU load in Windows 98 - Googling it lead me to 3rd party programs and forum posts saying that they don't measure CPU load very well in Windows 98.

Reply 4 of 38, by ntalaec

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It's curious, I own a Socket 7 board (Pentium 200 MMX), and using a USB 2.0 PCI card in Windows 98 SE I get the same speed that you mention (1.5 MB/3 MB) but in this case is copying from/to USB. Maybe it's a bug in Windows 98 SE?

Regarding the network card, you could try a couple of things:
-TCP Optimizer
https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
To tweak the windows registry for the best settings for your network speed

3Com NIC Diagnostic Program
http://uzumaki.se/download/Drivers/3Com/3c90x/windiags.exe
To change some parameters for the NIC card
After decompression, run "Update.exe /diag" (without quotes)

Reply 5 of 38, by SPBHM

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I also noticed very low transfer speeds on 98se with my p3, thankfully I have XP also on that PC and used it for larger files and it works way better, with the expect speed for 100mbps,
I didn't really try to find the cause of the slow speed, it's fine for smaller files and I avoid 98 for networking at this point, XP is much easier to work reliably with other windows 10 PCs on my lan.

Reply 6 of 38, by vetz

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I've noticed the same on some of my Win98 builds, getting speeds between 1.5-2.5mb/sec on 100mbit. Never really figured it out why its fast on some but slow on others.

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Reply 7 of 38, by WildW

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Not sure why I didn't think of this before, but I tried repeating the same test on my overkill Windows 98 machine which has a faster hard disk and Athlon 64 CPU. It was able to pull 3MB per second over the network, which isn't a whole lot better. I'm willing to accept the "It's just Windows 98" explanation.

Reply 8 of 38, by texterted

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I get about 7 0r 8 mb/sec using the onboard Marvel on my A8V. It's meant to be a Gigabit controller but only works at 100 on 9x.

See if you have an option for "Delay Transaction" in the bios. If so, then enable it.

Cheers

Ted

98se/W2K :- Asus A8v Dlx. A-64 3500+, 512 mb ddr, Radeon 9800 Pro, SB Live.
XP Pro:- Asus P5 Q SE Plus, C2D E8400, 4 Gig DDR2, Radeon HD4870, SB Audigy 2ZS.

Reply 9 of 38, by WildW

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texterted wrote on 2020-04-08, 10:49:

I get about 7 0r 8 mb/sec using the onboard Marvel on my A8V. It's meant to be a Gigabit controller but only works at 100 on 9x.

See if you have an option for "Delay Transaction" in the bios. If so, then enable it.

No, nothing like that in either machine's BIOS. The P3 in particular is pretty basic as it's a Gateway OEM machine.

Reply 10 of 38, by texterted

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Aye, I think it's in the "southbridge" options on my A8V.

I suppose we should feel lucky it even works at all.

Cheers

Ted

98se/W2K :- Asus A8v Dlx. A-64 3500+, 512 mb ddr, Radeon 9800 Pro, SB Live.
XP Pro:- Asus P5 Q SE Plus, C2D E8400, 4 Gig DDR2, Radeon HD4870, SB Audigy 2ZS.

Reply 12 of 38, by marvias

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My P3-450 on Asus P2B-LS with integrated Intel Pro/100 can get 5-7MB/s download from FTP with cpu utilization around 80%. I have similar experience with D-Link DFE-530TX. And TCP Optimizer actually made it little worse. I read here at Vogons that Intel Pro/1000 GT might give faster results , around 100mbps on 1gb link, but I didnt try that. Problem is Windows 98's network stack. In Linux or XP its actually possible to get to 12MB/s on 100mbps. Trick is in disabling interrupt moderation in card's settings.

Re: increase network speed on windows 98

Reply 13 of 38, by Sedrosken

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I'm getting around 8-9MB/s on my RTL8169SC card in Win98SE. My whole network is stuck at 100mbps right now because I don't have the correct cabling and I suspect my router can't do gigabit over its ethernet ports anyway -- despite being Wireless-N compliant as well.

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Reply 14 of 38, by matze79

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I have Gbit Card on PCI in my P3 1Ghz and i can roughly Transfer up to 70mb/s.

A PII 300 should have no struggles transfering fullduplex 100Mbit..
We ran them as Servers back in 2000.

Does your Card share IRQs ? a VIA USB 2.0 Card for example can give a lot of Trouble.. or Silicon Image SATA Cards..

Grab a Copy of Knoppix Bootable Linux CD, insert it and try transfers on Linux.
So we can rule out its a Windows Issue 😀

https://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

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Reply 15 of 38, by mrau

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not sure this will help i believe many cards offer full offloading only on winnt but not on win 3 and 4
i also remember some simple settings were very suboptimal in windows 4 out of box, not sure whether it was about frames or timing;

Reply 16 of 38, by matze79

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Yes, maybe the MTU is set wrong.

This could be a issue too, and maximum network connections at once.

Microsoft hat very bad default values..

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Reply 17 of 38, by darry

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Do not currently have a local ftp , so ran test with remote FTP on Internet and still got ABOUT 7,5 MB per second on 100 Mb link in 98se with stock TCP settings on P3 1400 with Intel Pro 100 card .

C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>ftp ftp.videotron.ca
Connected to ftp.videotron.com.
220 Bienvenue sur le serveur FTP de Videotron.
User (ftp.videotron.com:(none)): anonymous
331 Please specify the password.
Password:
230 Login successful.
ftp> cd pub
250 Directory successfully changed.
ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Here comes the directory listing.
1GB.file.test
1M.file.test
226 Directory send OK.
ftp: 29 bytes received in 0.06Seconds 0.48Kbytes/sec.
ftp> bi
200 Switching to Binary mode.
ftp> get 1GB.file.test
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 1GB.file.test (1073741824 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
ftp: 1073741824 bytes received in 143.90Seconds 7461.72Kbytes/sec.
ftp>

Reply 18 of 38, by swaaye

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Windows 98 is really inefficient at SMB transfers (Windows file sharing). The PIII will bottleneck it but even you you had a Core 2 in there it wouldn't be great compared to XP or newer. XP is also slower than Vista+ but this is only a problem with gigabit rates.

One tweak I've seen improve speeds a little is disabling interrupt moderation on the NIC so it can freely blast the CPU for all it's worth. Maybe this indicates SMB is using tiny transfers that are inefficient with high bandwidth rate.

Reply 19 of 38, by darry

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I just put an Intel Pro 1000 GT in my Pentium 3 1400Mhz .

After running TCP Optimizer, under Windows 98 SE, using FTP, I top off at 20 Megabytes per second in downloads.

Under Lubuntu Linux, still with FTP, I get 43 Megabytes per second, and the CPU is pegged at 75% . I am clearly saturating the PCI bus at this point (disk controller + NIC each using 40+ Megabytes per second ).

I am running with 1500 as MTU in both cases .

FTP source is a NAS that has no trouble saturating a Gigabit link when used with a modern machine .

TLDR: Windows 98 SE network throughput sucks . Luckily, I only need the speed when running backups under Linux .