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1990-02-20
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Network Performance Issues
A very common question is: "What can I do to speed up my LAN?"
There is, unfortunately, no cut and dried answer, as LAN performance
is influenced by many different factors. Discussed here are the
major issues:
First, note that the "speed of the LAN" can be a couple of different
things: (1) the physical transmission speed of the hardware
(generally 2 or 10 Mbps with adapters that Artisoft sells) and (2)
the effective throughput, or how fast data can travel from one place
to another on the LAN. The latter is generally what users want to
speed up, since the former is not alterable.
The one thing that probably affects throughput the most is the speed
of the CPUs in the machines that are connected to the LAN. Not only
the server's CPU speed is important, but also the speed of the
workstations' CPUs. One generally would want to have the fastest
CPUs for each machine on the LAN, but this is obviously not
practical, as it can be rather expensive to purchase fast 386
machines for all users on a LAN. However, if you use 4.77 Mhz XT
computers as workstations, you can expect that your throughput will
be slow no matter what flavor of adapter you have in the machine. In
fact, just increasing the processor speed from 8 to 10 Mhz in a 286
machine can increase throughput up to 20%!
The transmission speed of the adapter card will also make a
difference. Generally, with reasonably fast machines, moving from a
LANtatstic 2 Mbps adapter to an NE3 Ethernet adapter at 10 Mbps can
double the throughput of the LAN. However, if you have a slow
processor moving from 2 to 10 Mbps will probably not make that much
of a difference. This is because the 2 Mbps adapter has a
coprocessor that does all of the low-level NetBIOS functions, whereas
the Ethernet adapter does not have a coprocessor, forcing the
PC's processor to do all of the NetBIOS work.
Adding disk caching to the server will also help. We recommend
either Golden Bow Systems' VCACHE (which we use in-house currently)
or Super PCKwik from MultiSoft (which other users have reported
success with). In either case, you have to configure the cache to be
"write through," so it does not cache disk writes. In Vcache's case
this involves adding the switch '/T=0' to the command line. For
Super PCKwik, use the '/H-' and '/D-' switches. Other caches may
also work, but keep in mind that they must be configured as write
through. Caching software should be loaded before any of the NOS
software in order for it to work correctly.