I ran some tests at work across the corporate switched 100bT. It's a holiday today so no LAN traffic to speak of.
The setup is basically the same mentioned earlier, only this time I'm using 100bT in the Dell, filer and my own desktop machine.
client1: Dell 4200/300 (2xPII@300MHz, 512MB) kernel1: 2.2.5-15smp (RedHat 6.0) driver1: eepro100.c
client2: Asus P2B (1xPII/333MHz, 96MB) kernel2: 2.0.37 (RedHat 5.2 + ac 2.0.37 final) driver2: 3c59x.c
filer: F760, OnTap 5.3 driver: onboard 100bT mount: rw,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,bg,hard,intr,udp,nfsvers=3 write: dd if=/dev/zero of=filer bs=8192 count=12500
Over switched ethernet I'm seeing sustained 100MB writes to the filer average 7.8MB/s for the Dell, 5.2MB/s for the Asus. Read speeds were 8MB/s for both setups out of filer cache. Given the theoretical ethernet limits, overhead etc, etc this is pretty good performance.
For grins on the Dell I tried remounting with nfsvers=2 and saw 6.5MB/s. Using the OOTB linux amd(8) automounter performance dropped to 2.3MB/s.
If there's a message here it's probably not that linux is so great or all that terrible either. There is always a strong correlation between network, NIC, NIC driver, os, memory and CPU on both ends of the wire. Any one of them out of balance can dramatically impact throughput.
Rgds, Tim.
Send email if you want more detail. I'll check out an Ultra5 + Solaris7, and an F210 and publish those as above. --