SUMMARY : Solaris 2.X and low bandwidth lines

From: Federico Bertone (Federico.Bertone@bussola.it)
Date: Fri Sep 06 1996 - 04:19:57 CDT


Hi to all,

the original message's subject was "SS4 too slow in sending packets".

As usual this list is great ! Our problem has been solved.

Many thanks to :
Rachel Polanskis <rachel@juno.virago.org.au>
Matthew.Stie <matthew@imonics.com>
David L. Markowitz <dav@litronic.com>
for their answers.

Thank you also to :
Biagio Fioretti (Sun Microsystems - Turin)
Luciano Barillaro (Sun Service - Milan)
for the attention and for the patches.

My ORIGINAL QUESTION was :

> We provide Web service with two SparcStation 4 running Solaris 2.5.
> The internal LAN (10 Mbit/s Ethernet) is connected to the Internet via a
> dedicated 64 Kbit/s line (through a Cisco 2501 router).
> In addition there are 8 dial-in modem lines (28.8 Kbit/s) entering an Aurora
> multiserial board connected to another SparcStation on the same LAN.
 
> Well, both the SS4 are fast when send packets over the internal LAN (for
> example an FTP session is executed at 1 Mbyte/s), but both become very slow
> when the packets (we tested FTP and HTTP sessions) are sent over the 64 Kb/s
> line or over a dial-in line.
> The maximum rate we got over the 64 Kbit/s line is 1.0-1.1 Kbyte/s, while the
> maximum we got over the 28.8 Kb/s line is 590-600 byte/s.
 
> About 1:5 of the available bandwidth. Too slow ? That's the situation :-((

> Everything instead works well when the two SS4 receive packets (I can ftp to
> them from my PC connected via modem reaching 2.8-2.9 Kbyte/s as transfer rate)

The SOLUTION.

It seems to be a well known problem, caused by Sun Solaris constantly trying to optimize for 10 Mbit/s (and faster) networks.
Everything works well installing the following patches :

            2.4 2.5 2.5.1 affected
       |-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------------|
       | 101945-42 | 103169-06 | 103630-01 | /kernel/drv/ip |
       | 101945-42 | 103447-03 | 103582-01 | /kernel/drv/tcp |
       |-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------------|

Also suggested : kernel jumbo patch installation.

Federico Bertone
La Bussola s.c.s.r.l.
Torino Italy



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