Also sprach mark ross
Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain all this, It sounds like you have been using this platform for a while....
For about 6 years, yeah. :)
Do you think the 486 processor is the reason for the Netserver card's lack of performance ?
Nope, I don't.
The reason I ask is that, I think the pm3 only has a 486 processer onboard and I have not heard of any "quake lag" with the pm3.
Don't think so, I'm pretty sure the pm3 has a 386 processor in it. Which is why I don't think the 486 is the limitation in the NETServer. If a 386 can handle 30 ports without any Quake Lag, a 486 should be able to handle 48 without breaking a sweat. 3Com borked something in the code when they were mucking with it, plain and simple.
Also did you try setting "ppp in modem" to help reduce the load on the Netserver ? did it help ?
It helps a bit, I had forgotten about that setting. I believe I remember correctly that you hit quake lag with about 30 ports active with ppp in modem set...if you didn't have it set, I'd guess you'd hit it at around 25 or so. Let me expound on "Quake Lag" a bit. As the name implies, this was discovered as part of the game Quake's rising popularity. Many games along those lines use a large number of very small UDP packets to communicate with the server. This is about the worst punishment you can give a router as its the way to get the highest number of route lookup and packet processing overhead while still keeping the actual bandwidth pushed as low as possible. The claim by 3Com is that Quake Lag is only experienced when there is a combination of traffic patterns, some connections using small udp packets, some using large tcp packets for example. I don't know that this was ever confirmed by users.
About half of our modem server are tc with netserver cards, the other half are pm3's. It never fails that the tc's hunt group fills up with users while our pm3 hunt groups have avail lines.....
TC's have (or at least had...not sure about recently) better modem code.
any idea on what Hyper arc's are going for ?????
Don't know pricing, no, sorry. -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456 - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.