Here are my Lan Speed Test results on Win2K:

This is slightly faster than what I get when copying an ultra compressed 7-Zip archive, but close enough I suppose. Curiously, I can't get these speeds under WinME, which I'm dual booting on the same PC. Under Win2K, I get a steady 8.1 MB/s when copying files over the network, while under WinME the speed varies between 4-7 MB/s. Maybe the network stack is worse under Win9x or something.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-01-19, 09:30:

Maybe the network stack is worse under Win9x or something.

It *is* worse.

Windows 9x works fine with 10 Mbps Ethernet, but sucks really bad with 100 Mbps.

I've tried it many times, in various hardware configurations - Linux, mTCP, Windows XP all approach the theoretical maximum of 100 Mbps LAN.
But in Windows 9x, it's always much slower.

I think there's some third-party utility to optimize Windows 9x for the 100 Mbps, but I've never tried it myself.

Program called TCPoptimizer can do wonders with network speed of Win98/SE/ME. When I still daily drivered 98SE, it was absolutely needed to get all of the 500Mbits of the internet connection I had at time. Without I got only couple MB/sec instead of nearly 50MB/sec that the connection could give.

Interesting, thanks for the tips! I'll try that TCP Optimizer to see if it helps.

Since I'm dual booting Win2K and WinME on my rig, it's not much of an issue for me, but it might be helpful for other systems with just one OS.

EDIT - I just tried TCP Optimizer v3.08 which can still be downloaded from the developer's website and works under Win9x. There was a slight improvement, mostly making the transfer speed more stable under WinME. But still no match for Win2K.

But as far as LAN shares speed goes, it depends also on what OS the share lives on. 9x seems to be fastest only to other 9x shares, and similarly NT only to other NT shares. Selective ACKs option seem to make the biggest difference on the LAN shares in TCPoptimizer, but there are other settings that can be adjusted and which will be relatively machine specific but I have forgotten a lot of what I have had to do in past around these things...
Drivers/hardware also play a role, I could never get great performance with a Realtek 1Gbit NIC, but Intel one on the same machine was significantly better, i.e 10MB/sec higher speed.

I'm seeing some weird behavior on my 1GHz PIII with a 10/100 card (I think it's a Linksys RTL8139-based PCI card).

LAN Speed Test gave me 74Mbps on 98SE to a SMB share. However RetroZilla only downloads at *100kbps* and WMP7 is constantly buffering on a 300kbps video stream.

WMP7 seems to just kind of be very bad at streaming video (serving it with VLC over mmsh). Not sure why RetroZilla is so slow. I haven't tried other browsers.

I'm pretty surprised I get such speeds on SMB, but I'm not complaining.

Queen K Juul wrote on 2025-01-19, 12:17:

LAN Speed Test gave me 74Mbps on 98SE to a SMB share. However RetroZilla only downloads at *100kbps* and WMP7 is constantly buffering on a 300kbps video stream.

What file size did you use for the LAN Speed Test?

For me, 500+ MB files were needed to get accurate results.

For older systems don't forget to make sure that the hard drive can keep up! It wasn't an issue at the time, but now that we can use faster LAN hardware we sometimes ignore that factor.

konc wrote on 2025-01-19, 13:37:

For older systems don't forget to make sure that the hard drive can keep up! It wasn't an issue at the time, but now that we can use faster LAN hardware we sometimes ignore that factor.

Fair point.

On my Celeron rig, I'm using an SSD via IDE to SATA adapter, but it's still stuck on Ultra ATA/33 speeds of course.

For LAN benchmarking, I always download to NUL...

ftp 192.168.0.xxx
bin
get somebigfile.zip nul

I think it really depends on so many factors other that the actual card
that you can't really/easily come to a simple answer...

Things like:
What OS / related network overhead
Driver interfacing to hardware/OS overhead
What network "stack" and what is it's overhead.
What overhead/delays in switches and routers

I've done a lot of very low level networking... much of it was "raw packet"
level with my software directly communicating with the NIC hardware...

Things like an office voice PBX (telephone system) back in the 10mbps days
which could maintain many full-bore (uncompressed) two-way audio streams...
all on a little ARM processor (when Windows clients had difficulty keeping
up with ONE).

I still maintain a few DOS systems, and use my own tool (DDLINK) to move stuff
between then via network. This uses raw packets (no overhead in a network
"stack") - I've not put time/effort into optimizing the transfers, but things
do seem to move between them noticeably quicker than between my systems
running more complex OS/stacks...

I could put together a tool to test raw network transfer speed (which would
transfer a lot of data without actually writing it to local storage)... but it
would have to run under DOS, and since I wouldn't be inclined to write modules
for every possible NIC, it would have to rely on something like Crynwr
packet drivers ... so a part of it would not be under my control...

My advice... don't worry too much about what the absolute maximum speed your NIC
can achieve, just decide it it's "fast enough".

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Grzyb wrote on 2025-01-19, 20:25:

For LAN benchmarking, I always download to NUL...

Interesting. I do wonder if using ftp would be faster than copying files from a WinXP network share. But I'm too lazy to install a ftp server on my WinXP system just for the test. Maybe someone who is already using that approach can chime in.

The method which I use for measuring transfer speeds (other than LAN Speed Test) is my everyday scenario: copying an ISO file or a GOG offline installer from a WinXP network share to a local folder on my Win2K machine. I use Total Commander for this, and it helpfully lists the transfer speed in KB/s. I've also looked at the transfer time, and it does check out, e.g. around a minute and a half for a 700 MB file.

BTW, I did notice that the CPU utilization goes up to 100% during the transfer. And this is with a 3Com card which supposedly offloads at least some functionality from the CPU.

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-01-19, 23:36:

My advice... don't worry too much about what the absolute maximum speed your NIC
can achieve, just decide it it's "fast enough".

Agreed, and this thread is mostly meant for fun.

Also, because of curiosity, as I've seen the same network card behave differently depending on the operating system and/or CPU speed. So I'm wondering if other people have experienced something similar.

Grzyb wrote on 2025-01-19, 10:18:

It *is* worse. […]
Show full quote

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-01-19, 09:30:

Maybe the network stack is worse under Win9x or something.

It *is* worse.

Windows 9x works fine with 10 Mbps Ethernet, but sucks really bad with 100 Mbps.

I've tried it many times, in various hardware configurations - Linux, mTCP, Windows XP all approach the theoretical maximum of 100 Mbps LAN.
But in Windows 9x, it's always much slower.

I think there's some third-party utility to optimize Windows 9x for the 100 Mbps, but I've never tried it myself.

Iirc there's some registry setting for buffer window size, but I can't remember if it worked on 9x.

Gotta remember, OS' were configured around their use cases. NT was expected to be run on high end hardware with scsi and 32mb of ram.
9x targeted 8mb of ram and pio modes 0-2 (up to ~80mbit though in practice way slower)

There wasn't much point configuring it for hardware that it wouldn't be run on or wouldn't exist for a few years.

100mbit was only ratified in 1995. It wasn't widely used until well after 98.

I tried something interesting today: FireWire networking. How? Easy, I have a couple of retro rigs with Audigy cards, which of course have a FireWire port on the back. I connected two of them together using a 6-pin FireWire 400 cable and set up their IP addresses manually. It worked fine, and the computers were able to see each other on the network. On my Celeron 600 system, I was getting transfer speeds between 6-12 MB/s under WinME. Meaning, I experienced similar speed fluctuations as with the 3Com card, likely due to the Win9x network stack. Unfortunately, I couldn't test this under Windows 2000, as that OS doesn't appear to support FireWire networking out of the box, at least from what I've seen.

However, I did manage to network my Athlon 64 3400+ rig with my Core 2 Duo E8600 system using FireWire. They also use Audigy cards, but have WinXP as the secondary OS. Under WinXP, FireWire networking worked fine, and gave me a steady transfer speed of 18 MB/s (no fluctuations).

This was mostly for fun, I just wanted to see how FireWire networking works. I'm guessing faster transfer speeds are off the table because Audigy cards are using the PCI bus, or maybe it's something with my setup. In any case, this is a fun alternative to regular network cards, though not very practical.

Have you tried using tool like SuperCopier 2 ? It does wonder for small files.
SuperCopier replaces Windows explorer file copy and adds many features:
- Transfer resuming
- Copy speed control
- No bugs if You copy more than 2GB at once
- Copy speed computation
- Better copy progress display
- A little faster
- Copy list editable while copying
- Error log
- Copy list saving/loading
Would it help with LAN I don't know ...

Back in the days of switching from dialup to broadband for internet people played around with MTU setting to get the best speed under Windows 9x.

https://strongvpn.com/mtu/#:~:text=Windows%20 … ing%20problems.

Dhigan wrote on 2025-01-29, 19:28:

Have you tried using tool like SuperCopier 2 ? It does wonder for small files.

Interesting. I haven't tried that utility before, but I might give it a shot. Usually, I'm using Total Commander when copying files over the network, as it too can show transfer speeds during the process.

Unknown_K wrote on 2025-01-29, 20:53:

Back in the days of switching from dialup to broadband for internet people played around with MTU setting to get the best speed under Windows 9x.

https://strongvpn.com/mtu/#:~:text=Windows%20 … ing%20problems.

I think the TCP Optimizer adjusts that, among other things.

Keep in mind that network speed and file transfer speed are very different things. On some systems they'll be similar, but on others there's going to be a big difference. Especially when you use a gigabit adapter on motherboards from the 2000s.
"iperf" or it's Java equivalent "jperf" is a good utility for isolating the network speed, without getting other operations involved.

On some systems the PCI bus gets saturated. Also, the frontside bus and RAM can get hit 4x: reading a file from disk to RAM, reading that file data back from RAM, converting it to network packets as it's written back to another location in RAM, and then reading those packets back out of RAM to send them out to the network.

In the late P4 period, some desktop motherboards (i865/i875) start to have an onboard GbE controller which uses a dedicated link to the chipset. This is a big advantage for file transfer speed because it relieves pressure on the PCI bus.
Server boards have multiple (and higher throughput) PCI buses which make them much faster at file serving than an average early 2000s desktop board that has the disks and GbE and other devices all on the same 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus.

Gigabit ethernet is also CPU heavy. On a Slot-1 server I remember finding I was still CPU limited with a 600MHz Coppermine.