Realtek 8111E kicking my b*tt

[jaybee]

So is that potentially the fix? To get a PCI(E) NIC card? Would Intel work with an AMD mobo, or does it require an Intel chipset?

Ultimately, I guess we should wait to see if they can update the NIC drivers in unRAID.  Or if it's possible for us to do it manually.

Whenever I have read on forums people talking of backup/transfer speeds on their home lan, more often than not the most popular recommendation is to reduce the bottleneck of realtek or other onboard ethernet, and switch to an Intel pro dedicated card. Whether or not this is effective I cannot say from first hand experience, but there seems to be a fair following for using them as they have better throughput. i.e. Yes gigabit ethernet in theory is capable of 125 MB/s, but you will never get this in reality. Intel Pro can make it be nearer to that number. However, I will personally be seeing what I get out oy my realtek before potentially buying an Intel. Every little helps I guess.

[PeterB]

Yes gigabit ethernet in theory is capable of 125 MB/s, but you will never get this in reality. Intel Pro can make it be nearer to that number.

Indeed, iperf shows that I can achieve 114MB/s between two machines with Intel Pro embedded network controllers, with two consumer grade switches in the path.

[defected07]

I was maxing out at about 65 MB/s and then the connection died.  My WiFi to the APE was still alive, but the Ethernet port died on my Mac (I'm connected on both, just changed the Preference Order to WiFi being first after it failed).  I'm wondering if it's the program (ForkLift) that I was using to transfer (because it actually shows you your speeds--unlike Finder).  So I'm not sure if the Ethernet connection on the APE actually dies, or if ForkLift is responsible for killing the Ethernet on my Mac, or if the Realtek on the Server is also dying...

[cyrnel]

After a bunch of fruitless messing about with kernel parameters I ran across posts describing video and nic performance problems with this board under Windows. The fix was to disable various power saving features in the Windows drivers. Sounded relevant and familiar (old lessons learned again), so I disabled everything I could find related to power saving in the EFI gui. Short version (all I have so far) is things seem to be working. No IRQ Disabled messages since and workstation to unRAID copies stabilize ~65MB/s (no parity, per Win7 progress). Some irony here given my original intent of power savings, but then I haven't checked power consumption differences after the settings or which settings are really important. Hopefully I'll have time to play with it more this weekend. Meantime it's rebuilding parity for another 10hrs.

[defected07]

So where did you do this? Under BIOS? This happened again using Finder, but I couldn't find anything obvious in the Mac, APE, or unRAID logs.

[cyrnel]

So where did you do this? Under BIOS? This happened again using Finder, but I couldn't find anything obvious in the Mac, APE, or unRAID logs.

Whoops, sorry. Kind of late.

What I was trying to do was disable power-saving features that could result in extra effort required of the system, more latency, and less capability. That meant disabling anything I could find in the board's EFI gui (not much) and similar kernel options e.g. pcie_aspm=off. To me the problem sounds different than yours, though fundamentally they may be very similar. Problems at the edge of performance usually are.

Don't rule out your switch/router. They can throw in some extremely annoying side-effects. If you don't step back after awhile and test things against a different device you can easily waste time. On to my next post...

[defected07]

I brought my server to my friends' house to load up on some data, and this happened again.  It took down his whole network (just like at my house)

Had to do a hard reset on the router, then I just transferred one by one, but that is very annoying.  There must be a way to fix this, without purchasing a new NIC card..

He also has a different router than me.  I have an APE, he has a Dlink Xtreme Gaming router or something like that.  So, what else? And if I got an Intel NIC, would PCI be fine? I only have a PCI-E (x1), 2x PCI, and a PCI-E (x16)--which I heard are mostly for video cards? Filling up the x1 PCI-E with a SATA card, and may need more, so should a normal PCI port be adequate for an Intel gigabit NIC?

[wsume99]

... should a normal PCI port be adequate for an Intel gigabit NIC?

Yes.  To fix my 8111C problems I got a PCI card because I didn't want to sacrifice a PCI-e slot and it works perfectly.

[defected07]

Ugh :/ this is annoying.  Onboard NIC should be fine, do we think its a driver issue then?  How can we upgrade the drive manually? I'd like to try that before buying a card, if possible...

[cyrnel]

For now, since there appear to be several causes or twists to the Realtek problem, for me it's best to go the easy route and add a card. I really didn't want to but better people are working on it. I expect we'll see later releases of the driver able to contend with our boards. Until Realtek throws in more versions. Dilbert R&D: "If they've worked around all the problems we aren't creating enough of them."

Yes, PCI can just handle GbE. Don't use the other PCI slot, there isn't much headroom. I bought the usual Intel Pro GT - PWLA8391GTBLK - $30. You could probably use a cheaper one but chipsets and variations make it luck of the draw.

[PeterB]

Onboard NIC should be fine,

Yes, it should be ... but in my experience of Realtek, stemming back over 15 years, Realtek has always given me headaches - except, for some reason, the Netgear GA311 using the 8169.

As I've stated before, I always avoid motherboards with Realtek chips (just troublesome) and Atheros chips (poor driver support).

Just buy yourself a decent nic card (PCI is fine, assuming that there is no other heavy user of the bus) - either the GA311 or an Intel.

[defected07]

Does it seem like my problem is similar? Would the card take down the whole network? What happens, data gets backed up because of the NIC and supposedly brings down the network?  Will this new card draw more power, even if I disable the onboard one?

[cyrnel]

I'd have to see the effect played out to know how similar it is to mine. In my case I'd see lots of overruns, a sign the driver isn't able to get the data out as fast as it's arriving, then the IRQ disabled and link lost/up messages. It didn't seem to affect other systems on the same switch, though I was only really watching errors on the sender and receiver.

If it helps, mine wouldn't even handle 100Mb gracefully. The problem took longer to show but the results were the same. If you wanted to be more certain of a card fixing your problem you could try a dirt-cheap 10/100 card. If it works it'll be better than the Realtek Gb and maybe we'll get lucky with release 5.0.

Yes, the card is bound to use slightly more power than the built-in but it shouldn't be noticeable without test instruments.

[defected07]

OK, well if I'm going to buy a new card, I'm going to go all out and get a gigabit, since I want to have those speeds if possible.

I'm going to pick up that Trendnet switch while I'm at it...

Do you guys use Jumbo frames? What is the advantage to this? Transmitting larger blocks of data over the network?

[cyrnel]

Not here, not at the moment.

Jumbo frames mostly help where there's lots of latency which makes many small transactions expensive. For a local network that's usually not the case. They can be difficult to make work right depending on the combination of network equipment involved, and changing equipment can mess up your carefully tuned settings.

Do jumbo frames last, after everything else is stable.