Hi Mike & everyone on udpcast
I fiddled with my new bootdisks again today. I can now get about 93.6Mb/s on a switched 100Mb/s network.
As you said, the main limiting factor lies in how quickly the receiver can write the data to disk. I tried using compression, but that made it slower, so I decided to use hdparm to set the disk: "hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/hda". This made a _huge_ difference!
My next step is to recompile everything on my boot disk, using ulibc. Then there should be enough space to include a compression program on the boot disks, without using higher densities. I expect this should make quite a difference as well, seeing as the cpu is now free to do this kind of thing. I'm just not sure whether it's really possible to compress data fast enough. Gzip is not fast enough on the hardware I have. It would have to be faster than 95Mb/s to be of benefit in this situation.
I'll make my disk images and sources available on http://tlug.up.ac.za/downloads.html asap.
Cheers
Andrew
On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Mike McCall wrote:
Andrew,
I would love a copy of both the sender and the receiver disks! As you might have noticed from some of my posts to the list, the off-the-shelf disks don't work for a couple of our PCs due to a funky bios. Just let me know how to get the files! Thanks!
As for udpcast printing stuff to the screen, when I have used both statically compiled binaries and the boot disks, there is a LARGE amount of printing on the screen for the sender, and an activity status (transfer rate) on the receiver. You might want to make sure the binaries compiled successfully. If you want to try the binaries I have, I can send them to you.
By the way, does your boot disk have hdparm on it? I have noticed that the receivers can't keep up on a high speed connection without it.
Thanks again!
Mike McCall Computer Technician Rio Rancho Public Schools
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