I’m stuck and can't figure out how to get my speeds any faster, or figure out why my transfer speed is so slow between PC’s compared to from the Internet.
Please be aware when reading this that because of how hardware reports speeds, and how software and OSes report speeds, I’m using both Bps (Bytes per second) and bps (bit per second).
- 8bps = 1Bps
- 8mbps = 1MBps, and so on.
Here’s my setup:
File Server:
- OS: Lubuntu
- RAM: 2GB
- Wired Ethernet 100
- Download speeds from speedtest.com is ~5MBps
- Actual download from high seed torrent ~3-3.5MBps
- Hard drive speed ~60MBps
Client:
- OS: Ubuntu
- RAM: 16GB
- Wi-Fi B/G/N (Connected at 72.2Mbps, 9MBps)
- Download speeds from speedtest.com is ~3MBps
- Actual download from high seed torrent ~2-2.5MBps
- Hard drive speed ~400MBps
Router: (Server connected via wired Ethernet, client over WiFi)
- Wireless B/G/N with 4x 1G Ethernet ports
I’ve tried several different connections, and the best speed I’m getting according to iperf
is ~1.3MBps in either direction. I've tried SMB, FTP, etc, and NFS gets me the best speeds for file transfer speeds according to the system monitor.
Actual file transfers however from client to server in either direction fluctuate anywhere between 120-200 KBps.
Both systems during transfer have 99% idle CPU time. The client is only using 700MB/16GB RAM. The server is only using 100MB/2GB RAM. HDD activity is very low compared to doing local file operations.
netstat
, nfsstat
, etc are not reporting any dropped packets or timeouts.
I’ve eliminated possible bottlenecks like CPU, RAM, HDD. So how can it be that I’m getting so much more speed from the Internet compared to within my LAN?
UPDATE
After a couple of days, and not really changing anything, I’m now all of a sudden getting over 20Mbps. The transfer speeds of 2-3MBps are much better. However, my slowest link here is the WiFi at 72.2Mbps which is 9MBps. Taking out any overhead and whatnot, I should still be able to achieve 7-8MBps but I'm not even at half of that yet.
Transfer speeds from Client to Server are about 2-3MBps. But Transfer speeds from Server to Client are about 5-6MBps.
Why are they different?