TCP Slow On Linux, Fast on Macs

Pete Harlan (harlan@mymenus.com)
Thu, 22 May 1997 15:25:31 -0500 (CDT)


Hi,

Our LAN of Macs is connected to the net via a Linux box. Netscape on
the Macs loads, e.g., Dilbert cartoons

<http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/>

as quickly as I'd expect our 28.8 ppp dialup line would allow. But
Netscape on our Linux machines, which are on the same Ethernet, takes
five or ten minutes to load a page that takes twenty seconds on the
Macintoshes, never loading at more than 90 bytes/sec, and spending
most of the time stalled, _even_on_the_Linux_machine_that_is_routing_
_packets_for_the_Macs_.

This is with all recent 2.0.x kernels, including pre-2.0.31.

I've noticed it with Netscape 3.1 and lynx, but ftp, telnet, ssh,
etc. seem fine.

I mean, sure the Mac's tcp/ip implementation always beats Linux, but
not by quite this much...

--
Pete Harlan
pete@mymenus.com
That was sarcasm.