[tulip] netgear 310tx

[Hank Barta]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Allan McIntosh wrote:

> I am using  a Cyrix MediaGXtm MMXtm Enhanced 233MHz machine as a router
> and it appears that the machine can not handle 100Mbits of
> throughput (The machine comes to a stand still when testing). There is 1
> netgear 310tx and an rtl8139.

    I am surprised to hear that because I asm using an old laptop
    for my firewall (cable modem) and it seems to have no trouble
    keeping up. It has:

	486/33 (thinkpad TP750Cs)
	12MB RAM
	1x 3C589 PCMCIA combo Ethernet card (using 10BaseT)
	1x Dlink ne2000 10/100 compatible card (connected to
	a 10/100 cable modem, so it runs at 100 Mb/s)

    At the highest sustained throughput - about 450 KB/sec.  in
    one direction, 'top' reports a CPU load of about 60%. And I
    believe Donald has mentioned that the ne2000 takes a lot of
    CPU cycles.

    With a 233 MHz processor, you should have in the vicinity of
    about 10x the processor horsepower, (but perhaps not 10x the
    I/O bandwidth?)

    As an aside, I wonder how I would know if my firewall was
    slowing down my cable modem throughput? Most people people who
    would seem to know more about this than me recommend a P133
    minimum for a firewall, but the 486/33 seems to be doing fine.

    (But maybe I'd see 700 or 800 KB/sec with a faster machine. ;)

--
Hank Barta                            White Oak Software Inc.
hbarta@enteract.com                   Predictable Systems by Design.(tm)
		Beautiful Sunny Winfield, Illinois