Bridging InfiniTV4 PCIe with Gigabit NIC Causes Speed Loss

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highfigh

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Bridging InfiniTV4 PCIe with Gigabit NIC Causes Speed Loss

#1

Post by highfigh » Wed Feb 22, 2012 3:32 am

I've got an issue I'm hoping someone here has a solution to..... of course :D

Awhile ago I moved my ceton into my win 2011 home server. This has been working very well for me except for one annoying issue. Now that my tuner is bridged to my gigabit nic, I have lost a substantial amount of network speed to/from my server. When the bridge is not created, I get max transfer rates, as much as my discs are capable of. This is usually around 110 MB/s up/down. But as soon as I create the bridge, my speeds hit a wall. Whereas I was using 99% of my network bandwidth, now I see a max of 48% from my server, and 35% to my server. This is what I was seeing with my onboard gigabit nic on my gigabyte motherboard. I thought perhaps the onboard nic was crappin out on me, so I recently installed an Intel gigabit nic. Thought for sure that would take care of the issue, because now all my clients and server have the same network card. But alas, it has only slightly improved performance. Now I see about 48% usage from my server, and 35% usage uploading to the server. Has anyone else experienced this? I know there are not a lot of folks running the tuner from a dedicated server, but for those that are, what are your speeds if u have gigabit network?

I should also note that before I was using a wrt54g with a gigabit switch. But I have since replaced the router with an e3000, running all clients/server directly connected to the gigabit lan ports. And I have fiddled with most of the settings in the intel nic configuration. I even tried teaming the ceton tuner with the intel nic instead of using windows bridge. This greatly increased my speeds, but teaming won't work with wmc i suppose, because i lost access to ceton tuners.

I submitted a ticket with ceton, but they were not able to help. Seems like they have not seen this issue. Or those who do bridge with a gigabit nic don't care about getting max network speeds.

One more thing. I even tested with iperf, and seen 255 mbit/s to server, and 357 mbit/s from server.

Here's to hoping someone has some answers! ;)

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Scallica

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#2

Post by Scallica » Thu Feb 23, 2012 12:24 pm

I would install a another network card from a different manufacturer and see if the issue happens. If it does, then you know for sure there is a bridging issue with the tuner. You could always have two adapters in the system. One for bridging and one for file transfers.
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highfigh

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#3

Post by highfigh » Thu Feb 23, 2012 4:05 pm

Yeah it's definitely an issue with the network bridge that is created with a ceton. I'm not sure how windows network bridge works but if it's like intel nic teaming then the team is only as strong as the weakest unit. When teaming nics both cards must have the same features in order for the features to be used, like flow control, jumbo frames etc. So ill just bridge the ceton to the onboard nice and use the Intel for other network traffic. I'm not exactly sure how to do this and make sure the TV is only using the bridge and all other traffic is using the Intel, but ill follow up when I get it all sorted incase anyone else wants to know. I'm just wondering how windows network handles two nics on the same homegroup when it seems both interfaces will have the same network name.

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#4

Post by highfigh » Fri Mar 09, 2012 3:07 pm

Just an update. I have yet to get things going full speed. Even bridging two Gigabit nic's together still allows for no faster transfer. Ceton thinks that the its not negotiating at full-duplex. I even tried a new Gigabit switch. And trying to use another card dedicated to network transferable has been more than confusing. There seems to be no simple way of doing this.

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#5

Post by KHTPC75 » Fri Mar 09, 2012 6:16 pm

Bridging connects two different networks together at the data link layer to allow them to communicate with each other as if on the same network segment.

There's a whole lot of overhead with bridging. Especially when the bridging is being performed by the OS and not the network card.

Give this a try:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302348

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