Network Slowdowns?

[Jamie]

In <200610062026.k96KQ8KU060912 at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Matthew Dillon <dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> mentions: >    There are a couple of possibilities.  One is that the driver is broken
>    or can't handle that particular card or motherboard device.  Typically
>    when that happens you get 'watchdog timeout' messages on the console.
>    Run 'dmesg' to see if you get any such messages.

Nope, no watchdog messages.

I do get several of these though:

xl0: transmission error: 90
xl0: tx underrun, increasing tx start threshold to 120 bytes

I read some place this had something to do with DMA buffers and was more
or less harmless.

It's a 3com card:

xl0: <3Com 3cSOHO100-TX OfficeConnect> port 0x6800-0x687f mem 0xe8000000-0xe800007f irq 10 at device 11.0 on pci0

On the other end, 
Linux calls them this: 3Com PCI 3cSOHO100-TX Hurricane  (I use 3Com on all machines)

I do get an awful lot of these:

nfs: server mercury not responding, still trying
(mercury is the dragonflybsd machine) of course during these times, the nfs mounted
directories and all programs depending on them are unusable.

I can usually trigger this by just writing a lot of data to the NFS directory. I don't 
know if it's related or not. 

>    If you are not getting watchdog timeout messages then it could be 
>    cabling or auto-negotiation problem, or an ARP problem (two machines
>    on the network trying to use the same IP address).

Hmm.. I really doubt it's a problem with two machine attempting to use the same IP, I use
static IP's below 192.168.1.100. I'll check some more into this to be sure.

The way it seems to happen is it gets progressively slower until I reset the card. Repeat.. 

>    What kernel version are you running?
>
>						-Matt

1.6.1-RELEASE DragonFly 1.6.1-RELEASE #4: Thu Sep 14 09:41:54 CDT 2006

Someone else suggests it could be a duplex mismatch, I'm looking in to that at the
moment, (I have never messed around with that, left them at their defaults.)


Jamie
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