duplicate from mac to windows client runs glacially slow

[davidduff]

i am trying to duplicate a portion of my mac mp3 library over to a windows machine.

 

i have retrospect workgroup running fine. system is healthy. the windows client in question gets backed up regularly -- there would seem to be no major communication problems between the two machines in question. both machines are connected to a switch. mac has 100Mb/s ethernet. pc (an old laptop) has 10Mb/s ethernet.

 

i do an immediate backup in retrospect. things start up normally, but progress at an INCREDIBLY slow rate. after running for several hours only a few dozen files copied. after running overnight, about 25 files and ~200MB have been copied.

 

there's nothing in the logs that indicate any errors. cpu utilization is low on client and server. network is not congested at all.

 

i can't figure out how/why anything could possibly run this slow!

 

when i back up the windows client machine in question, things run at normal speed.

 

any suggestions of things i can try?

[CallMeDave]

Quote:

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do an immediate backup in retrospect. things start up normally, but progress at an INCREDIBLY slow rate.

 

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I take it that this is a typo; that you're doing an Immediate Duplicate?

 

To confirm:

 

- Retrospect (version?) running on OS X (version?)

- Retrospect Client (version?) running on Windows (version?)

- MP3 library resides on OS X machine

- Source->MP3Library, Destination->DefinedWindowsVolume_onClilent

 

- Have you tried Duplicating some other collection of files, something uncompressed and of similar size?

 

I'd guess that there's something about the compressed nature of these files that is causing the communication slowdown.

 

Dave

[davidduff]

yes, sorry. typo. i meant immediate duplicate instead of backup.

 

i traced the problem down to a screwy network card. i was using an old 3com 10Mb/s card that i had lying around. it worked ok (reasonable speed) when doing backups, but apparently somehow caused or contributed to the extremely slow performance i saw on trying to use the machine as a destination for the duplicate operation.

 

when i swapped with a newer 100Mb/s card from my wife's laptop, everything worked normally. (and by that i don't mean that it was just 10X faster. it was more like 1000000X faster.)

 

so it's probably a bad driver or something.

 

details:

 

client

 

3com model 3cxe589et pcmcia network card.

sony vaio sr7k laptop

win2k w/latest patches

retrospect client version 6.0.110

 

server

 

blue & white g3 powermac w/ g4 processor upgrade

retrospect workgroup 5.1.167

mac os X v 10.3 with latest patches