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A friendly reminder that MacTCP performance is godawful - OpenTransport is nearly 3x faster

aperezbios

aperezbios

6502
If you have 6-8 megabytes of RAM in your cmassic Mac, here's why you should use OpenTransport instead of MacTCP...

On my Quadra 650, with 40 megabytes of RAM, System 7.5.3R2, using the built-in AAUI Ethernet interface.

Rrunning MacTCP 2.0.6, when downloading a multi-megabyte file from a local HTTP server on my LAN, I get a measly 40 kilobytes/sec.

On the _exact same machine_, with OpenTransport 1.1.2 installed and in use, downloading the exact same multi-megabyte file, the download speed is stable at about 115-120 kilobytes/sec, which is nearly three times the throughput. I also tried with OpenTransport 1.3, with the same results.
 
The fastest networking speed I seen was from a WGS95 (PDS SCSI card with full cache) running A/UX 3.11 and either a IIfx or Quadra running the last version of OT. Its been ages but I think the speed was over 200KB/s sustained.
 
Unknown_K said:
The fastest networking speed I seen was from a WGS95 (PDS SCSI card with full cache) running A/UX 3.11 and either a IIfx or Quadra running the last version of OT. Its been ages but I think the speed was over 200KB/s sustained.
Click to expand...
....which is still a measly 1.6 megabits. Classic MacOS network stack never, ever performed well, and Apple never seemed to care.
 
On the contrary,
Considering that file sizes were much smaller when these Macs were in use, BUS speeds were slower, IO on HDD was slow, I'd say 1.6 megabits is not too bad, and at times a software stack conflict error that that goes un-noticed by the OS but hinders performance. When you compare it to dialup over a serial modem of that era, I'm sure you'll agree, it's not bad at all.
 
mikes-macs said:
On the contrary,
Considering that file sizes were much smaller when these Macs were in use, BUS speeds were slower, IO on HDD was slow, I'd say 1.6 megabits is not too bad, and at times a software stack conflict error that that goes un-noticed by the OS but hinders performance. When you compare it to dialup over a serial modem of that era, I'm sure you'll agree, it's not bad at all.
Click to expand...
Sure, it's "enough" in the context of slow-speed serial links, but that wasn't really the point of my original post. OpenTansport is faster, that's a simple fact. There's nothing wrong with using MacTCP as long as you don't care about throughput.
 
Understood, I use both actually. Sadly, AppleTalk Internet Router will not work with OpenTransport. But my Mac SE/30 flies with OpenTransport 1.3 and Mac OS 8.1 Asante SC EN.
 
Pushing my 540c to the limit with OT 1.3.1 the best I was able to get was 2.04 Megabits/s on a hardwired ethernet connection. Back in the day that would have been flying.

olePigeon said:
I'd pay real money for a new MacTCP compatible TCP/IP stack.
Click to expand...

Well, at least we have OT 1.3.1 for 7.1.1+ now. It's an improvement over OT 1.1.2.
 
That won't change anything concerning the network stack. MacTCP is old and they made a lot of mistakes with it, but some improvements were made with OT.

On the other hand, OT is a huge memory hog, bloats up the size of the System Folder, cannot run on floppy disks, drags down system performance on 68030s somewhat noticeably and requires later System versions and 68040/PPC before it's actually OK. For 68000/68020/slow 68030s you're better off with MacTCP in most situations.

Apple has had issues with a number of systems integral to the Macintosh over many years: SCSI performance (pathetic), mediocre bus designs, trashy internal graphics, ROM mess, bandaid up bandaid upon a bandaid that is the operating system, and other faults. Still, the GUI to the user was still better than anything else before Windows 95, basic networking was simpler than most of what anybody else had and it worked well enough for its era.
 
The ethernet daughter card on the E-Machines Futura II cards does not work with Open Transport, unfortunately.
 
Are any of the TCP/IP parameters (MTU, timeouts, caches, buffers, whatever?) somehow adjustable or hack-able in either MacTCP or OT?

I ask because the networking stacks of Windows 9x offer similarly mediocre performance out of the box, but given some careful adjustments to the various settings, they can actually become competitive with some more modern implementations.

c
 
aperezbios said:
If you have 6-8 megabytes of RAM in your cmassic Mac, here's why you should use OpenTransport instead of MacTCP...

On my Quadra 650, with 40 megabytes of RAM, System 7.5.3R2, using the built-in AAUI Ethernet interface.

Rrunning MacTCP 2.0.6, when downloading a multi-megabyte file from a local HTTP server on my LAN, I get a measly 40 kilobytes/sec.

On the _exact same machine_, with OpenTransport 1.1.2 installed and in use, downloading the exact same multi-megabyte file, the download speed is stable at about 115-120 kilobytes/sec, which is nearly three times the throughput. I also tried with OpenTransport 1.3, with the same results.
Click to expand...
not sure if ive messed up my testing but for me on SE/30 running vanilla 7.5.5 i get 160KB/s with MacTCP v2.1
with Open Transport (v1.1 according to get Info) i get 64KB/s
after installing OT v1.3.1 i get 64KB/s

worth pointing out that i use SpeedCopy extension so i haven no idea if that skews the results between MacTCP and Open Transport
also worth mentioning that i have a PDS NIC and it seems to use a MTU of 754 with MacTCP but OT has a MTU of 1500 (like most modern hardware also does) and it uses the built in Apple drivers

personally i always thought OT performed better then MacTCP so the results i got make me wonder if SpeedCopy isnt accurately reporting back the trasfer speed.

is there another way i can more accurately test the performance of MacTCP vs OT?
 
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