Upgrade from 100 mbps to gigabit ethernet?

[Jeff]

Speaking of using tightvnc in another thread and finding it a tiny bit slow on my 10/100 lan, I wonder if I should consider upgrading to a gigabit ethernet for an instant response. The Netgear 10/100/1000 NICs are cheap now, and the switches for home use aren't bad either. I wonder how much improvement I'd see for 10/100/1000 cards on the computers that only have regular PCI slots for the adaptors? Has anyone else here made the switch for a faster local LAN?

[ryount]

We have a gigabit switch at the office, copying files is much faster but I can't say I saw an improvement when using VNC.

[Randall]

I'm using a Firewire 400 connection between the Mac and my aging Dell PC (1.3MHz Celeron running in a 600Mhz system). I get a little bit more speed out of VNC, but now the Dell's CPU seems to be the bottleneck.

I can see in Task Manager's Networking tab that I'm using only a fraction of the available bandwidth, even as I'm maxing out the CPU just moving windows around on the desktop. (Sometime I'll bring the Mini to the office, where I've got a 2GHz P4 and a gig of RAM, and see if it can make better use of the Firewire connection.)

Now I know why Apple didn't go with Firewire 800 for the Mini. You need a lot of horsepower to move bits at that rate of speed. I don't think I'm even getting the full data rate for file transfers, because I'm hobbled by an ATA/33 controller in the Dell and a 4200rpm hard drive drive in the Mac.

Someday I'll have hardware that can keep up with a gigabit network, but not today. :hrmm:

Randall

[Kevin]

The primary advantage of gigabit ethernet is when sending really large blocks of data. For stuff like vnc where there is a constant stream of little packets I doubt you will see any difference. You would probably get more benifit out of buying high end 100Mbit hardware than low end gigabit hardware.

[Jeff]

Can anyone recommend free tools or how-to's to quantitatively evaluate how good (how fast for an application like VNC) my onboard Intel and PCI Netgear NIC's and inexpensive Netgear FS516 switch are compared to better quality, smarter, higher priced gear?

[Kevin]

The best performance measurement for something like VNC is probably your eyes. I use Intel and Netgear (mostly the older ones with the tulip chips) and they work great. In fact they are my favorite 100Mbit cards. If you are not getting good performance the first thing to check is that everthing is actually running 100Mbit and full duplex. Those two things can make a huge performance difference.

If you want to upgrade the switch you can get an old but better switch used. Something like the Baystack 450 or Cisco Catalyst series would be good and shouldn't cost too much used.

I would stick with the Intel and Netgear NICs unless you are going gigabit and I wouldn't expect gigabit to make much if any difference in something like VNC.