[Pc_Support] Re: Realtek 8169 -- sound typical for CIFS/SMB on RTL81x9 series at 100Mbps

[Bryan J. Smith]

Chris wrote:
> Aren't these supposed to be GigaBit cards? 2MB does seem a
> bit shy of scorching, doesn't it...

I'll bet you he's getting 100Mbps (see my comments below).
See my previous post to PC_Support on why ... (as well as other reasons) ...
  http://lists.leap-cf.org/pipermail/pc_support/2006-August/002382.html

> MTU issues? (I think these support "jumbo" buffers?)

I did some more digging.  It looks like that most RTL8169 ICs do have
the 8KiB TX + 64KiB RX SRAM standard.  But the 8KiB TX only allows
7422 byte frames.  That's hardly "standard."  But at least it _does_
seem to have 64KiB RX on-ASIC/MAC.

Again, I'm trying to verify that all RTL8169 products have that
though.  I want to say some (earlier?) RTL8169 GbE ASIC/MACs only had
a 2KiB RX + 2KiB TX SRAM.  But maybe I'm thinking of another vendor?

> On the dedicated Linux box, does ifconfig look any different when
> the other box is booted into XP? Duplex mode - Any TX/RX errors?

Agreed!  Hit "netstat -i eth0" and look at the statistics for the interface.
NT 5.x (XP/200x) has an equivalent command (with slightly different options).

With 64KiB RX SRAM, you shouldn't be quite that low, more like 3-4MBps
for CIFS/SMB (again, what's your protocol/usage?).  Although the
RTL8169 driver under Windows might be crap as well.