Our office network has about 10 work stations and 2 servers. Every box has a gigabit nic but until recently we were running on a 10/100 switch. I recently upgraded everything to Vista and upgraded the switches to gigabit switches. All software checks out and everything is great but the speeds actually are slower. I know that bandwidth and speed are two different things, that's a given but before the upgrade transfers were at 1MB/s from box to box now they are like 500kb to 750kb at best. Any idea why a major upgrade like that would cause a slow down?
Check the NIC duplex settings (may be called Media Type for some cards)for all devices. You may want to set them all manually to the highest setting, ie 1000Mbps Full Duplex. test and see if that helps. What could be happening is that the NICs are negotiating at half duplex at the Automatic Setting while the switch is set to Full Duplex. G'luck.
The challenge is that there are multiple machines so I doubt that the nics could all of a sudden go bad on 10 machines + 2 servers. Is there a good network tool for testing whether you are getting real gigabit bandwidth?
Ah, well if they're all sluggish check the settings and try setting them (or making sure they're already set to) Full Duplex.. Windows machines I presume?
Well, did you know that a single NIC can goof up things...or misconfigured NIC and errors in the switch? Check the settings carefully and install the latest drivers for the NIC.
Maybe these can help : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000339.html http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1170558&page=5 http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=66&TopicId=11382
Only a few of the cards support jumbo packets but the switches do. A few good things. I did manage to use TCP Optimizer which seemed to help by about 100% over what we were getting so thanks