benchmarking and performance tuning

[Peter Stein]

First, thank you Mr. Becker for providing the tulip driver.
Thanks to this driver I have 2 Linux systems connected in
a very cost effective way (2 Netgear FA310TX NICs connected
via a category 5 crossover cable).
 
Can someone on this mailing list suggest where I might find
information on:
 
1. Determining if my ethernet configuration is performing at
   the optimum level.
 
2. Tweaking and tuning the setup to improve performance.
 
I'm new to setting up ethernets and do not have a sense of
what the performance data should look like for a configuration
like mine. I've sifted through a lot of documentation, but
only found one performance number which didn't seem applicable.
 
Right now I'm seeing a transfer rate of 18-19 Mbps on a ftp of
a large file to /dev/null. It seems like the driver is causing
the NICs to operate at their best setting (which is 100baseTX-FD).
When I force the driver to 10baseT-FD the transfer rate seems to
get cut in half. But 18-19 Mbps doesn't seem very good for
100baseTX-FD.
 
The driver revision I'm using is 89H. Any suggestions would be
greatly appreciated.
 
Peter Stein
nbi@xnet.com