OS 9 downloads super slow no matter what?

[jovianartifact]

So basically anytime I try to download anything on my OS 9 machines, it tops out in KB/s no matter what I do. Usually the rate ticks down KB/sec by KB/sec too.
G3/233, G4/1.0; same result.
GigE, 10/100; same result.
IE5, Classilla, Opera; same result.
FTP vs HTTP, same result.
Even different parts of the state with different connections make no difference. Library with giant T3 pipe is the same as my house with residential “nothing fancy” service.

WHAT GIVES? I’m starting to think it’s either a limitation of OS 9 itself (because X doesn’t seem to have these problems) or I’ve got something configured wrong. The PowerBook I’m now using has 10/100 Ethernet so I *should* max out at 12.5 mega<i>bytes</i> per second, correct? Of course I don’t expect to get that much throughput unless I’m torrenting but surely I should be getting more than 20-150KB/s, right? Anyone tell me what’s going on here?

 

[nyef]

That feels like it might be something screwy with long-lived connections in the TCP stack, given that it's protocol-agnostic, location-agnostic, and specific to OS 9. If it were me, my next angle of attack would probably to figure out how to capture a packet trace, filtering out the bulk of the data, and see if anything leaps out at me, like some size parameter shrinking over time or flow control getting squirrelly or something, but also acknowledging that it's probably not something that can be fixed through configuration.

 

[uyjulian]

Does it still happen when running the same application under OSX (Classic)?

 

[jmacz]

By chance are you using the same Ethernet cable, and if so, did you check what your machines are actually negotiating at? I had a similar issue which was caused by a poorly crimped cable.

 

[Compgeke]

That's just Classic Mac OS. The TCP/IP stack is suboptimal, and everything kind of chugs along with network transfer. Here's a G3 Beige with a 500 MHz G4 which also gets in that range.

 

[finkmac]

compgeke is correct. the classic macos networking stack is absurdly low performance.

classic networking or opentransport... it doesn't really matter. abysmal throughput.

 

[Unknown_K]

I kind of wonder why somebody hasn't coded Opentransport 2.0 and fixed the problem (or is it unfixable?). The WGS 95 is much faster over the network because of A/UX (and probably because of that caching SCSI card).

 

[adespoton]

I used to have a tool that let me modify the TCP settings for OT; I remember increasing the window and the block size on my iMac 233, and, since I had a stable network connection, the data flew! It meant that any collisions/corruption resulted in a temporary massive slowdown, but that happened so rarely that it wasn't an issue. IIRC, OT was optimized for dialup, which was part of why it performed so poorly over 100bt.

Oddly, I don't have that same issue on my G4 Minis running OS 9?

You're still not going to get anything comparable to A/UX, BSD, Linux or OS X, but with a few tweaks to the OT 1.x network stack, you can make it a lot better than the default.

 

[nathall]

My experiences concur with this being a strictly 9.x issue... My PM 8500/G3 that dual boots 9.2.2 and 10.2.8 gets massively differing speeds between the two OSes. The speeds I get under 9 match what others here have noted.