Speed is not symetric

[jimcamel]

I have several machines on a windows peer-peer network. some 98SE some XP home and XP pro. They are all wired on a 10/100 switch and all the machines have 10/100 cards. Some have only TCP/IP and some have that, of course, + NetBeui. I have a strange problem that I cannot dianose. A file transferred between 2 different machines travels at vastly different speeds. I get wildly different times pulling from A to B, pushing from B to A, pushing from B to A and pulling etc. I would have thought it would be pretty much the same - not a factor of 10 difference. I have factored out possibilities of bad cables/switches/hubs - I think it seems more related to the OS and sime hidden parameters in the protocols. Also, a straight DOS copy of many files runs at a snail's pace betwwen A-B but when I use Veritas backup software from A-B it runs at 5million bytes per seconds in the same direction on the same two machines. Any thoughts ?

Jim Camelford-Toronto area

[Greenstead]

This is a complex area and I don't have any simple answers for you (no-one does) - I don't know the answers either. Your observation is a common one though a factor of 10 difference is extreme.

This might provide some interesting reading for you and maybe even a solution:

http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/speeddif.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315237

If you decide to experiement remember that editing the registry can give fatal results.

[kdev13]

It shouldn't be symmetric. Speed depends on many thing. I.E type of Ethernet card (chipset too), other computer components, protocalls (netbieu is known to slow down things due to the fact that it constantly broadcasts using up resources), software being used (drivers, os, and other software)