A year ago or so I had a Mac Mini G4 and I had a problem with it regarding network - it was always very slow, despite help from other users I could never get it to work properly. It seems this problem was quite common.

A friend of mine would like to buy a Mac Mini G4 to use with MorphOS and I was wondering if they have fixed this issue with the release of MOS3?

Thanks!

Not for me. Transfer speed around 400-500KB/s (either locally against my NAS or sites I know have fast transfers, I have a 100Mbps optical fiber connected very close to the Swedish backbone) on instances when it could/should be 4-5MB/s. It seems not everyone have problems though?

What bothers me more is that when I recently tried to copy my MorphOS key file from my backup NAS over sambafs after a clean MorphOS reinstall, it didn't work. It had corrupted. I tried to send some jpeg to the NAS, and then back, doing checksum check before and after, and it didn't match. My NAS isn't borked, I know that for a fact. So either it's the ethernet HW in my mini, the network driver on the mini, the sambafs I was using, or something to do with my HDD or file system in the mini (the fact that there is no problems whatsoever when copying via USB memory stick rules out the latter two, right? I have tried to copy extensively between partitions, and no corruption whatsoever).

Something is borked. I think 400-500K in transfer speed is way too low.

It is a pity that it hasn't been addressed properly yet :(

I remember having the same problem with a PowerMac G4 but at least with that I could install a PCI NIC.

Same problem on 2 different PowerMac here. From what I can tell it isn't the NIC chipset, but rather the stack.

It really is terrible. It should be a priority for fixing but apaprently it isn't,

When I had a PowerMac I 'fixed' the problem by installing a PCI Realtek network card (well that isn't really fixing the problem but going round it - unfortunately you cannot install a PCI network card in a mac mini!)

>> I was wondering if they have fixed this issue with the release of MOS3?

> Not for me. Transfer speed around 400-500KB/s

I guess you both are talking about different problems here:

"downloading a file rarely goes over 20k/sec."
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7429&forum=11

> It seems not everyone have problems though? [...] Something
> is borked. I think 400-500K in transfer speed is way too low.

Opposed to Nostromo's problem, your "problem" is the same for everyone using MorphOS, see:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=8782&forum=3&start=3

@Andreas

Thanks for the clarification, I rarely use MorphOS for *heavy* network transfers (mostly because the apps I need for this are so much better on, say, Win7), and regular web browsing is working OK, so I haven't reflected over it much, only occasionally when downloading big/many things at once. On Win7 with uTorrent I think I have maxed out on 6-7MB/s and this was through the IPredator "VPN anonymizer" service, which I consider kind of nice, given the torrent characteristics. Direct DL is of course always *very* fast!

Well, I guess we need a modern network stack on MorphOS then?

Still a bit curious about the checksum/corruption issue I had though, when trying to DL the morphos key locally via sambafs? Must have been some sambafs related thing, since browsing is fine and reggae etc works fine, and archives I download from the net doesn't appear to be corrupted. I guess a corrupted byte once in a while can pass unnoticed in jpeg's and even in html files, but in archives?

[ Edited by takemehomegrandma 09.11.2012 - 19:50 ]

> It should be a priority for fixing but apaprently it isn't, :-x

Thing is that what would have to be done for a fix is a big amount of work.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=8782&forum=3&start=6

> I guess we need a modern network stack on MorphOS then?

Yes, that's very much the bottom line.

~500kB/s at the most here on this powerbook. I had this crazy idea of trying to run MiamiDX which I still have a key for but I`ve not looked into it at all yet.

> ~500kB/s at the most here on this powerbook.
> I had this crazy idea of trying to run MiamiDX

I doubt this would be much faster (if any faster at all), even with an MNI driver instead of a SANA-II one.

For my experience, MiamiDX is slow. Here are some network speed results which I made when MorphOS 2.x was released: http://jpv.wmhost.com/tcpip-test.txt

And MorphOS has never been slow with net on my machines (Peg1, Mac mini 1.42 and 1.5, PowerBook). I don't know why some people have it that slow :/ And I've been using these machines with at least three operators and half dozen routers/switches. Always fast.

I made quick test now with 1.5GHz mini and PB in my current network environment... in LAN with smbfs I got 9.5MB/s with PB and 10MB/s with mini. And max 800kB/s from internet with OWB.

> MorphOS has never been slow with net on my machines (Peg1, Mac mini 1.42
> and 1.5, PowerBook). [...] I made quick test now with 1.5GHz mini and PB in my
> current network environment... [...] max 800kB/s from internet with OWB.

I think most people with 2000 kB/s or faster connection would consider this slow, given that other OS on the same hardware is able to exhaust this connection speed.

Oops, I forgot to say that I have 10Mbps connection to internet, so it's fast compared to it. I just ran my ISP's speed test with OWB and it gave me full 10Mbps rates. I don't see why it wouldn't be as fast as the connection if I'd have faster connection, because it gives close to full speed on LAN too...

[ Edited by jPV 09.11.2012 - 23:57 ]

> I have 10Mbps connection to internet, so it's fast compared to it. I just
> ran my ISP's speed test with OWB and it gave me full 10Mbps rates.

Okay, full 1250 kB/s instead of the "max 800kB/s" you mentioned before on your 1250 kB/s connection seems fast. All I can say is that on my 4000 kB/s connection, I get only up to 500 kB/s with MorphOS (so I can confirm what others have reported) but get up to the full connection speed with MacOSX. I have no idea why you get 2.5 times the speed others get.

> I don't see why it wouldn't be as fast as the connection if I'd have faster
> connection

Then you may want to follow my links above and read the explanations written by people I'd consider experts on the matter.

> because it gives close to full speed on LAN too...

I guess that's because LAN works differently from Internet connection.

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:

That is not comforting. Just about my only complaint with MorphOS is network speed. 250k-300k is about the max I get, usually less. Watching downloads it bounces from 180K to 0K and anywhere inbetween. I find it hard to believe there is nothing that can be borrowed and ported from the open sorce world. But I am not a programmer, just an frustrated end user.

> I find it hard to believe there is nothing that can be borrowed and ported from
> the open sorce world. But I am not a programmer, just an frustrated end user.

I too am just a layman when it comes to this, but according to my understanding, simply porting a recent stack wouldn't suffice as you'd also need a revised Amiga-specific (or MorphOS-specific) interface between the stack and the driver (i.e. "SANA-III") so that the new driver can make use of the modern features of the stack.

Quote:

Ok, I should have had more emphasis on the word "quick test" in my original post. What I meant with that was that I just made quick tests from random sites and got pretty easily faster values than those 500kB/s than other saying the max was for them. I didn't try to find the fastest location without bottlenecks elsewhere in that case.

After MorphOS 3.0 release I have no more problems with network speed. I'm getting 100% speed - the same as on my pc.

> I just made quick tests from random sites and got pretty easily faster
> values than those 500kB/s than other saying the max was for them.

I'm baffled as to why this is the case. As said, I can confirm their 500 kB/s limit with my setup here. Maybe this is one of those mysteries that will never be resolved ;-)

> After MorphOS 3.0 release I have no more problems with network speed.
> I'm getting 100% speed - the same as on my pc.

Interesting. How many kByte/s is "100% speed" with your connection?

Just wondering, if my friend goes ahead and buys a Mac Mini for MOS3 on it... what sort of speeds will he get? Or there is no way to know this until he buys it?

Thanks!

> if my friend goes ahead and buys a Mac Mini for MOS3 on it... what sort
> of speeds will he get? Or there is no way to know this until he buys it?

If you read this thread you'll see that some people (including me) say that about 500 kByte/s is the maximum there is to get with HTTP downloads, but you'll also see that there are some users who for whatever reason experience a significantly higher download rate with their setup. The reasons for this discrepancy are yet to be determined.

Just to confirm, using Powerbook G4 5,6 (100Mbps wired) with Mac-Mini on the same LAN (different subnet) via 54Mbps wireless:

Tests were performed on the Powerbook, with the Mac-min as Samba server and Mint (Maya) ISO mirrored at Kent University (UK) as HTTP fileserver. HTTP transfer was using OWB, SMB transfers using SMBFS to mount shares.

HTTP over wired 100Mbps LAN > 20Mbps ADSL (with an actual Tx rate around 10Mbps).
SMB over wired LAN @100Mbps, wireless subnet @56Mbps)

HTTP maxes out around 800kBps (around 6Mbps) on download (upload not tested)
SMB maxes out around 1.1MBps (around 9Mbps) on download (around 250kBps on upload).

SMBFS is v1.74, Samba is the MorphOS v3.0.4 (updated) from Aminet.

Samba is started from INetD.

SMBFS is run with command line:

Quote:

(adding cache increased SMB transfer max from ~800kBps to ~1.1MBps)
(large stack value was just there for testing, haven't found a reason to reduce this yet)

Setting up Samba was more difficult than it should have been, but it's now working across subnets on all machines (albeit a little slowly)

----------------

On final thing which annoys me with Samba - after a while I seem to have multiple netbios-ssn tasks running taking up cpu usage to around 75% (splitting cpu usage evenly between tasks). Even after all transfers have stopped (even with the smb client disconnected completely), the tasks keep running.
Does anyone else experience this? Any workarounds/fixes?

[ Edited by boot_wb 10.11.2012 - 15:29 ]