[PLUG] Linux networking really slow on copy

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

I'm trying to copy about 3TB from a physical machine to a VM running on 
Debian8 + VMware Workstation 10, and it's going badly.  I'm copying 
2,000+ MythTV files; half are the tiny PNG thumbnail pics and half are 
*.mpg ranging up to a single 21G file.

I've had a lot of load and general slowness and since that same host and 
VMware runs my main "services" server that's not good.  I tried to cut 
out the overhead of SSH and Rsync as follows:
	source:	tar cv . | nc -q 1 192.168.80.81 5123
	target: nc -q 1 -l -p 5123 | pv -pterb -s 3T | tar xv

The data is now moving over a cross-over cable on dedicated NICs on IPAs 
that are not on my LAN, so I know the traffic is flowing on the x-over 
cable.  The physical machine has eth1 connected to eth1 on the Debian 
host.  That NIC has no IP on the host, but is bridged to vmnet2 in 
VMware and the target VM's eth1 is connected to that.

Target VM: # mii-tool
	eth0: negotiated 1000baseT-FD flow-control, link ok
	eth1: negotiated 1000baseT-FD flow-control, link o

The physical machine: # mii-tool
	eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD, link ok
	eth1: negotiated 1000baseT-FD flow-control, link ok	

eth0 is odd because it's connected to the same core GigE switch 
everything else is and all the other ports (e.g. the Debian host) are 
1000baseT-FD as expected.  The 100baseT is also part of the reason to 
try the dedicated x-over cable, which is 1000baseT-FD as expected.

In ALL cases I've tried so far, transfer speed starts out about as 
expected but then rapidly tanks to nothing and/or then flails around.

Examples:
	Originally with rsync:	11MB/s down to ~192KB/s
	Originally with netcat:	same
	Cross-over and netcat:	100MB/s to ~192KB/s but now all over

All over is ranging as I watch it from 74MB/s to 850KB/s but often 
hovering in the 15MB/s or 25MB/s range.

The source is an old PE2950 running Mythbuntu 14.04, the target is a 
slightly less old R710 running Debian8 + VMWst 10 and the target VM is 
booted into mythbuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso with the appropriate VM 
file systems mounted into /mnt/.

WTH?  Note I have not tuned the stock network stack on any machine 
involved.  So this looks like maybe I have a buffering or flow-control 
problem, but I don't know where or how to fix it.

Clues?

Thanks,
JP
--  -------------------------------------------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
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