trying to understand this snippet

[sulfurious]

Why force to half? Well, I have 2 switches, each with basically what amounts to 4 24-port switches within it. So, during my testing time, I set one full, one half, and two auto. I found that while forcing full produced the best results for most computers, that was not always true. Typically, for me, if forcing full still does not produce the 80%+ that I shoot for, then usually running it forced half will. I think it depends on the nic itself, but probably has more to do with the lack of options in a lot of the drivers today. I usually look around until I find a driver with lot's of options. Intel is pretty good about making drivers with options. VIA, while they have been the fastest for me, typically make a limited option driver. However, MS usually puts out a whql driver that has many more. So now I get those and don't go half too much anymore. 3com makes a decent pci nic as well.

One thing that has had an average of 15% improvement in network bandwidth is the Disable Task Offloading tweak. At least on my network, and at the LAN parties, that has been the case. As well as turning off any 'help' the card tries to give by using flow control, or adaptive technology or that kind of stuff. Messing with buffers sometimes give a big boost, as does pci bus efficiency settings. I guess it really depends on your hardware. On my LAN setup, I turn all that crap off and can often see downloads on a few peeps machines reach sustained 99% throughput. We are talking about the large files, like pk3's and stuff like that. Rarely do we see that sustained speed with lot's of small files, more like 93% on that stuff. But it is really cool to see the look on thier faces after I tweak thier nic and show them the increase.

I wish I had a copy of xp server (does that exist?). All I have available is 2000 server. And like I stated earlier, the simple file sharing with xp makes it soo easy to work with, unlike 2000. Perhaps there is simple file sharing in 2000, don't know. I use it at work, but there I want the permissions and such applied.

I spent most of last night looking at torrent technology. I am pretty sure that I can make that work in my LAN. Of course, all that does is get the directories. I will still have to make a script to do the rest of what I want done. But that is cool, cause at that point it will be all local.

I am going to continue to play with the server side application idea though. While the torrent thing will fix the large file downloading issue, I think learning some server side control would be beneficial.

So, thank you again, to all, for pitching in your ideas.

sul

[sulfurious]

Well, I got the torrents to work ok. However, I cannot seem to figure out how to allow the upload speeds reach local network levels. Seems to be limited to 'net' levels of bandwidth. Might be fine if you had enough clients pushing it, but I don't think it would be viable unless it was 'unlocked' to push 100 speeds.

Might just have to stick with the script if I can't achieve good speeds.

sul