Gigabit Ethernet?

[Joshua Ariizumi]

100Mbit = 12.5MB/s.
Supposing your file is 100MB, it'd take 8 seconds to transfer that file, or
4 seconds if in full duplex mode on the switch.  Unless the files are much
larger than what you claimed they are (> 80 MB), I seriously doubt that the
bandwidth is the bottleneck.

Rather, I think the problem is that the program is reading/seeking/writing
directly to the file, which Samba doesn't handle very well.  The only way to
solve this would be to store the files locally and then committing, or using
a database backend program IMO.

Gigabit would be a waste.  A modern hdd will read maybe 20-30MB/s
unbuffered, only a 1.6 - 2.4x improvement at the cost of $60+ per NIC and
$500+ for a 4-port gigabit over copper switch (of course you can get the
cheapy stuff but that definitely does hinder performance).  If you truly
think that it's maxing out the 12.5MB/s (put up mrtg or bandmon and check),
then you can get a 10/100 switch with a gigabit uplink (much cheaper) to the
debian box, and that may help the problem, but I would still say that the
problem lies in Samba and file accessing schemes.

Have someone make a quick perl/php script to enter data via web/app
interface to the server, and output collated data into a csv or txt file
which can be imported into quickbooks format, or go all-out and make an
alternative program would be my suggestion.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kimball Larsen" <kimball at kimballlarsen.com>
To: "Plug List" <pluglist at plug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 10:44 AM
Subject: Gigabit Ethernet?


> At my office, we have several large (> 80 MB) quickbooks database files
> that live on the samba shares on our debian box, so that multiple
> employees can do bookkeeping.  In theory, it all works just great, but
> because of the braindead architecture of quickbooks, looking up a
> client in one of these databases can take upwards of a minute....intuit
> (makers of quickbooks) charges $35/hr to talk to their tech support to
> find out how we can speed it all up, but we paid it anyway.. they
> actually said that there is nothing you can do to make it faster..
> apparently it has to copy the database to the local machine, do the
> lookup, and return a reference to the record on the network drive.
>
> So, in an attempt to speed things up a bit, we swapped out our hub for
> a switch, which helped when the network was under a moderate load, but
> we would like to see an even better improvement.
>
> Long story short, has anyone got any experience with gigabit ethernet
> cards under linux and winXP?  My clients are all winXP boxen...
>
> I would like to swap the 10/100 card in both the server and the client
> machines that need to do quickbooks stuff with gigabit ethernet if it
> would improve performance.
>
> Does anyone know a) what gigabit cards work well with debian 3 (woody)
> and XP, and b) where I can get them at a good price?
>
> Will this actually help much?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --Kimball
>
>
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