100 MBPS ethernet only going at speeds of 10 MBps?
I have my computer hooked up to a wired network. The properties says its connected at 100 Mbps but i have a program that monitors the network speed and it says im only transfering at 10 mbps. Is there something wrong with my network or is this normal someone please explain. By the way im running Windows XP.
I was transfering a 2.5 gigabyte file from one computer to the other. Cords are relativley new and not chepo’s either. Both computers are at 100 mbps. I was playing in the connection settings and i saw that the connection type was at 100 mbps but there was a setting for 100 mbps full/ duplex. What is this and could it be slowing down network?
PS My network card is a ULi integrated.
Networking is a funny beast. The thing to remember is, both of the computers on your network need to be running at 100Mb/s and that there are other bottlenecks.
If your internet is the only thing over the line, then you’re never going to transfer at 100Mb/s. Your internet is inherently slower than that. So you have ~10Mb/s coming through the internet, and then through your Local Area Network.
The other thing is that bottlenecks can be in a few places. I run Gigabit in my house (i.e. 1000Mb/s) and even though almost all of the computers have Gigabit network cards in them, I rarely come close to running at full speed even when transferring a multi-gigabyte file over the network. This is because the Network can actually run faster than the drives in the computer can write to the disks, or can handle the incoming data.
I’ll also point out though, that the Windows XP network stack is very poorly written, and cannot run anywhere near full speed.
It is equally possible that if you’re using a PCI Network Card that this may slow down your transfer. Not because the PCI link is to slow, but because the operating system has to copy network information through two buffers before it gets to the network, slowing down throughput quite a bit.
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