Intel ATOM D525 Network Performance

I recently had the occasion to use a small Intel Atom D525 based Linux server to do some file transfers from one machine to another. I noticed that the file transfers were not very snappy, so I started to look closer at the issue. The Microtik switch that I'm using has a nice usage meter on each interface and I noticed that a single rsyc over ssh was only giving me 100-150Mb/s performance. Realizing that this was compressed and using the somewhat whimpy Atom CPU, I backed off to a minimal compression algorithm and ended up getting a modest improvement (200Mb/s). So, running 4 parallel rsyncs seemed to be the trick, but I seem to cap out around 5-600Mb/s:


The CPU seemed to hover around 40-50%, which was odd, I would have expected to see a higher percentage if my performance was capped.

I later tried NFS to see if that did the trick, but it too capped around 5-600Mb/s. The particular distribution of Linux I was using was Zentyal 3.5, but I also tried on an Ubuntu 14.04 Atom D525 system as well with the same results.

Just to make sure it wasn't something to do with the server I initiated a transfer from my desktop PC running Windows 7. You can see the server doesn't have any issues keeping up. In a later blog post I'll go into the ethernet switch I'm using and how changing the default queueing method affects performance in a positive manner.

The end result is that I wasn't able to push the Intel Atom D525 board beyond 5-600Mb/s. It could be an ethernet driver issue since the CPU didn't seem to be loaded beyond 50%, but I figured it would be an interesting datapoint to share. If anyone sees differently, please message me with your results.

g15daemon with Ubuntu 9.04, Flashing issues

This is one for the archives, for that poor soul who is searching trying to figure out his problem. If you are using The Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard with Ubuntu 9.04 and you are having problems with random changes and flashing AM or PM in the clock module, make sure the keyboard is not plugged into a USB hub. I didn't find this in any of the Ubuntu documentation, but on the G15 Forumns page, which google didn't seem to index.

That is all.

Echolink on Linux

Over the last 5-6 years I've been in the habit of listening to the audio stream live Tuesday nights of the Houston AMSAT net. I actually have it setup on my Logitec Squeezebox to play automatically (which is a really nice feature BTW.) Tonight I finally noticed that for the past couple of weeks the net has been switched to just using Echolink. This was somewhat of an issue for me since I have just recently switched to Linux on my home computer. I was forced to look at what Linux options there were for Echolink. It seems like someone has done some back-end work, but there was nothing cohesive, definitely not polished or packaged. I decided to attempt to use WINE (Windows Emulation). I've attempted to use WINE in the past, but had mixed results. Seeing that this involved windows audio settings, I was thinking it would be the type of program that would fail miserably. I could not have been more wrong. I installed the Windows .exe using WINE without any bumps at all. The only minor tweak I needed to make was to change the default audio input device. I had to specify the USB mixer, since I was using a Plantronics USB headset.

It just worked!

As someone who has used Linux since Kernel version 0.98pl12 ish, I'm constantly amazed at how far it's come. This is going to make my project to exorcise my house from Microsoft operating systems a little easier.

One for the archive

Ran into a little quirky problem today. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on the home machine, finally giving Microsoft the boot. I also installed Gnome-do, and the docky app launcher. When Docky is up and running, I can't move any desktop icons to the lower third of my screen. It seems like Docky doesn't like sharing. This is Gnome-do 0.8.1.3. I'm using a dual-head system, I *can* move icons to the lower third on the second screen, just not on the screen where docky is running.