Benchmark network speed

Master (141)

21-09-2020, 16:54

For the development of the MSXUSB ethernet driver I would like to have an idea of the relative network performance.

For this I created a standard test that is hopefully reproducible with other hardware and other MSX-es:

MSX running Z80 on 3,58 Mhz
Ducasp's optimised TFTP client
TFTP server on my LAN (connected via Ethernet cable)
128KB test file to download (used a typical Nextor firmware image but any 128Kb file is good)
TFTP server.lan GET image.rom

I get a speed of approximately 3.146 bytes/sec.

This is okay but I believe this can be much faster. So what are the numbers you're getting on GR8NET, BadCaT, ObsoNET, etc.?

P.S. This benchmark also depends on the speed it can save the file, I use a Carnivore2 + CF.
P.S. MSXUSB runs via InterNestor Lite implementing TCP/IP in software.

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Par Meits

Scribe (6214)

21-09-2020, 20:53

If the save media is a thing, you could try a ramdisk.

Par Pencioner

Scribe (1335)

21-09-2020, 21:43

S0urceror wrote:

For the development of the MSXUSB ethernet driver I would like to have an idea of the relative network performance.

For this I created a standard test that is hopefully reproducible with other hardware and other MSX-es:

MSX running Z80 on 3,58 Mhz
Ducasp's optimised TFTP client
TFTP server on my LAN (connected via Ethernet cable)
128KB test file to download (used a typical Nextor firmware image but any 128Kb file is good)
TFTP server.lan GET image.rom

I get a speed of approximately 3.146 bytes/sec.

This is okay but I believe this can be much faster. So what are the numbers you're getting on GR8NET, BadCaT, ObsoNET, etc.?

P.S. This benchmark also depends on the speed it can save the file, I use a Carnivore2 + CF.
P.S. MSXUSB runs via InterNestor Lite implementing TCP/IP in software.

I wouldn't probably have no time to fiddle with my MSX-s until weekends btw, but i have GR8NET and i'd like to run this benchmark too when i have time. Though, before you consider your benchmark results - do you use an empty partition of CF card for downloading the file? With the empty partition write speed of C2 should be 130+Kbytes/sec but with partition which has files on it - can be significantly slower (even the latest Nextor kernel which have optimized the free cluster lookup routine still might have a delay on the first lookup). I'd suggest to make this nench either on RAMdisk, or on emty partition (there CF writes will not distort the result too much)

Par S0urceror

Master (141)

21-09-2020, 22:59

Agree we should use RAMDISK as the destination for this test to mitigate drive speed differences.
Very interested to hear your speed measurements. If you can post them here that would be great.

Of course the ones that do TCP/IP in hardware should be the fastest. But I also would like to see how for example ObsoNET+INL compares to MSXUSB+INL. Than I know what type of improvements I should be able to get

Par ToriHino

Hero (641)

22-09-2020, 00:33

I tried Ducasp's TFTP client (on TurboR A1ST in both R800 and Z80 mode with GR8NET) but it does not want to transfer any file. All I get (after Resolving host name... OK) is

Read request sent... 
Receiving (KBytes):

Finally after some time a timeout message. In the log on the FTP server I don't see any incoming connection. The original TFTP gives about the same results, using for example SofaFTP works fine. So no results here so far...

Par S0urceror

Master (141)

22-09-2020, 14:32

Update, doing the benchmark on a 192KB Ramdisk for a 128KB file, it starts fast but ends slow. Probably the same allocation thing going on.

The total speed with Ramdisk is slower than on C2 with 2259 bytes/second.

What about your experiences and measurements?

@ToriHino:
Please note that TFTP is something else then FTP. I choose TFTP because it is a much more lightweight 'trivial' file transfer protocol. Hopefully this would give us the maximum speed on our dear MSX.

Par SjaaQ

Master (170)

22-09-2020, 17:22

Not sure if this helps; but if I use the obsoftp server and push a 3MB file to my SD card on a GR8NET, the windows machine reports 41KB/s. Hardware used is a NMS8280 @7.14Mhz (Z80)

Par ToriHino

Hero (641)

22-09-2020, 18:03

Did some testing, this time with a TFTP server, writing to SD card:

TurboR, GR8Net, R800 mode: 128K file in 7 seconds
TurboR, GR8Net, Z80 mode: 128k file in 19 seconds

Par S0urceror

Master (141)

22-09-2020, 18:29

Thanks ToriHino and SjaaQ for testing. Looks like GR8NET with hardware accelerated TCP/IP is really fast.

What about network performance on INL? And other network cards?

Looks like there is still room for a lot of improvement on MSXUSB.

Par Manuel

Ascended (17513)

22-09-2020, 19:45

I remember using DOSSCAN.COM on my turboR with R800 and the Novaxis SCSI interace (1.59.64): 400kB/s. Strangely enough DOSSCAN.COM on the H: (RAMdisk) was only 100kB/s.

Just for reference

Par ducasp

Champion (400)

23-09-2020, 05:24

TFTP isn't great for that as it is a protocol that requires ack, so you are limited in number of packets you can send due to the ack mechanism.... HGET to a local server is way better, even better if it doesn't save to disk, so you rule out the disk killing performance, I have a hget for that, I'll share in the morning.