100Mb/s network speed

[antitrustworthy]

Just a quick and hopefully simple question... I have read differing and confusing accounts from lots of folks. How fast should I expect to see transfers on a 100Mb/s network. Just for clarity... yes, all cards are 100Mb, I am on a 100Mb router, AFAIK all cards set to 100MB/full. When I transfer files, gkrellm shows my transfer speed maxing out around 10M. Anyone familiar with gkrellm, what is the M exactly? Mb? MB? And is that a good speed on a 100Mb/s network? Thanks!

[dysharmonic]

All I know is that M stands for Mega and b for bit.

So it's Mb which is Megabit rather than MB which is MegaByte.

1 Byte = 8 bits.

[antitrustworthy]

Thanks for the reply, but I do realize that the network is in Mb, not MB. What I am asking is in gkrellm, it only shows an 'M'. Logically, it should be Mb/s, but since the number before the 'M' never goes above 10, I am hoping that it is MB/s. If gkrellm is showing that I am only getting 10Mb transfers on my 100Mb network, I have a problem.
Hope this clarifies....

[Smart]

The 10MB ceiling you are hitting is probably a result of your hard drives not being to read/write data fast enough. Most drives these days can read data very fast but writing files is still relatively slow.

When I use NFS to copy files, I get about 10MB max. However, when I used NFS to copy files from one computer with RAID0 to another one with RAID0, I get about 20MB.

Don't forget to use the 'time' option when running benchmarks. For example:

[root@local /]# time cp -r localdir remotedir

real 0m6.676s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.100s
[root@local /]#

It's really easy to keep track of how long something took!

[dysharmonic]

Try hdparm to speed up your disk I/O.

Ppl have been discussing a lot of hdparm here. Just do a lil search and you'll get what you need most :)