[dba-VB] OT: FYI-System Transfer timing

I just thought you might be interested in some numbers, transferring a large
file from system to system on a network.

Two identical computers, 3.8g X2 AMD proc systems, running Windows 2003.
Both systems run Comodo personal firewall (software firewall) with specific
rules allowing transfers from/to any other computer within my internal
network.  Both systems use an Areca 1220 dedicated RAID controller, and both
systems use Seagate 7200.10 drives in the arrays.  The "From" system has a
Raid6 Array, the "To" system has a Raid 5 array.  There is a gigabit switch
between the systems.  

I am transferring a 120 gbyte SQL Server database file (dbf).  When the
transfer started it "settled down" after a couple of seconds saying it would
take 48 minutes to transfer the file, which indicates about 2.5 gigabytes /
minute, 42 mb / second.  Testing has shown the read speed to be about 450
mbyte / sec for these arrays, so that is most likely the write speed of the
Raid5 destination array.  Write speed for these arrays is just slightly
worse than the write speed of any single disk.

Using task manager to simply view the network usage, the network seems to be
using about 40% capacity on average.

Again, using task manager, the CPU usage for the two cores shows core one
swinging between 0 and 40%with a rough average around 20%. Core two is
swinging between 60% and 80%.  When the work is steady (and there are places
where both cores, but particularly core 2 varies wildly), the "average" is
reported as around 40%, as displayed in the CPU Usage.  All of this usage
being on the transmitting system.  The task reporting most usage time is
system idle, then explorer.

System two (the receiving system) shows almost no Core 1 usage and Core 2
swinging wildly, but again averaging around 40% or so usage, both cores
combined, per the CPU Usage display.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com