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Hello dear TLUGers, for the last three years I have been proudly a Microsoft free geek and fortunately google have been able to answer all my questions till now.
I have been running Gentoo for at least an year and a half, without realizing that my network performance was not good.
I was getting downloads speeds of around 1.6Mb/s from most sites in Japan (I live in Tokyo), for example gentoo.gg3.net. Given that such speed is considerably fast I never suspected poor performance. Now, I happen to visit a friend using Windows 7 and when downloading from the same site I saw 6Mb/s. My first reaction was to think, "yeah, right!, why should I trust what Windows is saying", I quickly tested other sites and windows kept reporting higher speeds than my averages on my Gentoo box.
Now, either my friends provider was better than mine or Windows was reporting a whatever or my Gentoo box was not performing well.
I returned home, created a partition and installed Windows 7, I was shocked to discover that even using my provider I was getting 5 Megs or more. So I tested the second of the possiblilities and tried downloading the same file from the same source, first with Windows 7 (impresibly fast), then rebooted into Gentoo and found out that in effective Windows was 4 times faster. So I ran several tests even inside my LAN and always Windows seemed to be faster. WHY ?

So far I tried the following:

1. Tried to tune the TCP window Size and related TCP tunings
2. Tried twiking various setting from different sources for switches on my network card. (like increasing MTU)
3. Tuned IO performance, thinking that the bottleneck could be there. (hdparm, blah, blah)
4. Tried different congestion control options in my kernel
5. Ensured that there was no throttling or any degradation due to iptables (tried even disabling the whole thing)
6. Ensured there where no conflicting services (turned down every possible service in order)

I EVEN REPLACED MY NETWORK CARD. I thought that the driver for my old NIC might not have been mature enough (was Broadcom Tigon3 ) or something was wrong with my NIC.
I researched a well supported Giga card and got it. an Intel PRO/1000 PCI-E (82574L), one of the best cards in the market, I think, and I am using the e1000e driver. Still the performance hasn't change.

Its been a few weeks since I started trying and trying so I am provably forgetting to mention something out of the million things I have tried.

what's going on here?, why, why , why !

Some info:
#uname -a
Linux martin 2.6.34-gentoo-r2 #1 SMP Thu Jul 15 13:16:18 JST 2010 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
#cat /etc/gentoo-release
Gentoo Base System release 1.12.13
#dmesg | grep e1000e
e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 1.0.2-k2
e1000e: Copyright (c) 1999 - 2009 Intel Corporation.
e1000e 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> Link[APC6] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
e1000e 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
e1000e 0000:01:00.0: irq 27 for MSI/MSI-X
e1000e 0000:01:00.0: irq 28 for MSI/MSI-X
e1000e 0000:01:00.0: irq 29 for MSI/MSI-X
e1000e 0000:01:00.0: Disabling ASPM L0s
e1000e 0000:01:00.0: Disabling ASPM L1
e1000e: eth0 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX
#lspci | grep Eth
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection

Don't know what else could be relevant!

I thought I eliminated M$ from my life, I want to stay that way :)

Thank you in advance for any help and apologies for my poor English.

Martin.

[tlug] Network performance