bottleneck identified

Sunday, December 12, 2004, at 11:18AM

By Eric Richardson

In my living room I have a 10Mbit hub. It connects the computers in the living room, my room, and Chris's room. For normal traffic the fact that it's old and 10Mbit doesn't matter. But today I've been copying a partition's worth of data between my laptop and my desktop. I want to say it's around 10-12gigs worth of data. I didn't think about that when I started, but now a good two and a half hours later I can definitely say that I need to go out and buy a little 100Mbit switch. My transfer rate has been right around 1MB/sec the whole time, which is consistant with being about 80% of the potential for a 10Mbit connection (and 80% utilization is about what you expect to peak at).

If it really is 10gig, it should finish soon. If it's 12 I might still be waiting a while.