Extremely slow file transfers

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Ok I am connected to this guy down the hall via 100Mbit cat 5. He plugs into my switch, and then the cable plugs into a second network card that is in his system.

I can only send files to his ftp at about 800K/s which is really slow considering we are connected via 100Mbit. Also transferring small files to an from the server (files under 40K or so) take forever. I think this might have to do with the broadband tweaks I applied from speedguide.net

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[Hoser]

Is it really a switch, or is it a hub? There is a big difference when it comes to moving data around. A hub divides the bandwidth between the active ports. So if you've got a 5 port 100mb hub with computers on each port, they're only getting 20mb each. A hub also transmits to all the ports at once so there's going to be data collisions. With each data collision, the data needs to be retransferred.

Remember that it's 100 megabits, not megabytes. 100 megabits is 12.5 megabytes which would be divided among the ports.

A switch has the same bandwidth on each port. Also there aren't data collisions because the switch 'knows' the address of each LAN card and transmits the data only between the computers involved.

I first bought a 100mb hub when I started connecting computers together. I immediately found out that the data transfer speed wasn't what I thought it would be. I now have a five and eight port switch, so everything is a lot faster.

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Yes, I know what a switch is, and yes, I know the difference betweeen 100Mbit and 100MByte.

Transfers on large files average about 6.7MB/s, which is very good. On smaller files it hesitates between sending another file.

[OC]

Is the NetBEUI protocol installed? That can slow things down. It's a "noisy" protocol. Also, some NICs do not auto-set to 100Mbit, even when it's in that environment. Set the driver to force 100Mbit connections and NOT to auto-detect.

-OC

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Netbeui is not installed, the only protocol installed is TCP/IP. I will set all the nics to 100Mbit full duplex and see what happens.