Slow gigabit home network

Question

Yes, unfortunately it's one of those "where is the bottleneck" type questions.

C:\Users\sg\Downloads>iperf -c 192.168.1.10 -t 30

------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.10, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)

------------------------------------------------------------
[156] local 192.168.1.15 port 50710 connected with 192.168.1.10 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[156] 0.0-30.0 sec 1.02 GBytes 293 Mbits/sec

I'm not expecting anywhere near 1000 Mbit, but certainly not ~300 either.

My house is wired with Cat 6 cable. It's all terminating at a patch panel, and connected to a switch (D-link DGS-1016D).

I've got a HP Proliant N40L Microserver running Windows Home Server 2011 doing server duties including media streaming (the *.10 I benchmarked against). The HDDs are the Western Digital Caviar Green (2x EARX in a non-raid configuration)

I'm using a laptop (*.15), and there's about 3 other machines hardwired (including a PC, printer, and media player)

I also have a Netgear WNDR3800 router.

I've updated the drivers of the WHS2011 and my laptop.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where the problem might be or how to troubleshoot? I'm currently investigating Wireshark to see if I can narrow down the problem.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You have not-so-bad-results

>netio -M -t 10.1.14.6

NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.31
(C) 1997-2010 Kai Uwe Rommel

TCP connection established.
Packet size  1k bytes:  16.01 MByte/s Tx,  9.19 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  2k bytes:  14.89 MByte/s Tx,  8.44 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  4k bytes:  14.90 MByte/s Tx,  11.78 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  8k bytes:  16.07 MByte/s Tx,  13.68 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes:  16.48 MByte/s Tx,  15.34 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes:  16.20 MByte/s Tx,  15.95 MByte/s Rx.
Done.

It's my "gigabit", Atheros-DLink pair (MiltiCo in the middle, heterogeneous links in it)

With Atheros-Atheros pair I can get ~30 on max packets size. Jumbo-frame add ~10-15%. End hosts is mostly reasons of speed degradation (bus width, NICs)