On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, Ferenc Tamas Gyurcsan wrote:
>>firewall? I have an old 486/33 with 24M of RAM running RH6.1 with
>
> With an old isa-slot network card? That's pretty slow.
Not compared to the network it is hooked up to. You have to remember,
regular 10BASE-T ethernet delivers 10 megabits/second nominally, and more like
3 to 5 Mb/s in real world situations. Then realize that his ethernet wire is
hooked into a cable network whose nominal speed is more like 1.5 Mb/s, and
actual speed likely much lower then that. On top of *that*, you have to
consider the speed of the host at the other end of the link. If you're
downloading from a server that can only push packets out at 30 Kb/s, then the
ISA bus is more then fast enough to handle it.
Now, an older, slower system would impact network latency far more then
throughput in this situation. A slower CPU and bus means each packet will
spend more time in the firewall pipeline being filtered. So while an old 386
might not slow down file leaching much, I'm not so sure it would work as well
for (e.g.) real-time network gaming.
Here Derek has the right idea: Try some ping and traceroute commands, and
see what kind of return time you're getting. traceroute will show you which
element of your link adds the most latency. You can also try using a larger
packet size (e.g., "ping -s 30000") to get an idea of how throughput is being
affected.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to |
| everything else in the universe." -- John Muir |
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