The Upgrade: From NTTCP to High-Speed File Transfers

As I began to explore the possibilities of high-speed file transfers, I found myself disappointed with my initial results. However, after discovering an amazing series of posts on the Synovate blog, which I highly recommend checking out, I was able to upgrade my transfer speeds to incredible levels.

One of the first tools I discovered was NTTCP, a command-line interface that revealed my two machines were capable of more than one gigabyte per second performance between them. What's going on, you might ask? The answer lies in enabling Jumbo Packets on all clients involved in the transfer and on my network switch. This simple tweak significantly increased the data packet size, making it better suited for high-speed transfers.

Another crucial adjustment I made was tweaking Receive Side Scaling, a feature that leverages more CPU cores for network transfers. By setting it to match the settings with my number of logical processors on my PC, I aimed to optimize performance. Finally, I increased the size of both the Send and Receive Buffers to their maximum, which may have increased memory usage but yielded extra performance.

The results were nothing short of astonishing. My real-world transfers saw sustained speeds over double my original transfer rates. However, not all was rosy, and some transfers showed weirdness. For instance, one machine with a particular OS would saturate the connection while writing to the WANIK SSD server but only reach half or 60 percent of that speed when reading from it.

To eliminate as many variables as possible, I set up two test benches with brand-new installations of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Still, I encountered issues where one machine would saturate while writing to the WANIK SSD server but only limp along when reading from it. This limping along was still at an incredible 500+ megabytes per second.

Despite these challenges, I'm happy with the results and attribute them to the upgrades made using NTTCP. High-speed file transfers are now within reach, and I'm confident that with continued tweaking and optimization, speeds will continue to increase.

A Word About Building a Website

While experimenting with high-speed file transfers, I took a break to talk about something more accessible: building an easy-to-use website. If you've been thinking of creating your own website but don't want to be unhappy with the results, I've got just the solution for you. Squarespace is an excellent choice.

With its simple templates and powerful creation tools, anyone can build a professional-looking website without needing extensive coding knowledge. The platform also offers 24/7 tech support and starts at only $8 per month – affordable enough not to break the bank. To get started, simply pick out a template that suits your needs, customize it as desired, and create your website.

As an added bonus, Squarespace has a free trial, which you can sign up for today without any credit card required. If you decide to commit to their affordable plans after the trial, don't forget to use offer code LINUS to receive 10% off your first purchase.

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* Shopping at Amazon with our affiliate link

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These gestures of support help us continue creating high-quality content for you, our valued audience. So, go ahead and check out those links in the top right corner for video X – where we'll be posting something new soon!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en10 gigabit networking i mean think about it transferring files around to remote pcs at speeds upwards of one gigabyte per second that's a thousand megabytes per second well today we're not only going to do it we're going to give you some tips and tricks that will hopefully help you out when the time comes to move to 10 gigabit yourself whether it's at work or at home and on the subject of work i thought to myself hey how about clearing some space on my desk at work by building a pc under the desk drop a like on the video if you're amped to see my upcoming desk pc build blog the master case 5 by cooler master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower pc case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories click on the link in the video description to learn more you know i still remember how mind-blowing it was like the first time that i saw something transfer over my network at 60 to 70 megabytes per second with the onboard gigabit lan port on some enforce board that i had then shortly afterward my mind was blown again when the pci bus bottleneck was removed and thanks to onboard pci express gigabit networking i could transfer files thanks to my trusty diamond max 9 120 gig raid 0 boot drive at over a hundred megabytes per second wow then for the last 10 years well it's as though time has pretty much been standing still i mean sure the enterprise space is getting 40 gigabit and 100 gigabit links but it really feels like about a decade ago the entire industry had a meeting and decided that yeah gigabit is good enough for consumers and small businesses and let's just leave it at that well i say no more we are using and i'm using this term fairly loosely here affordable hardware to go 10 gig at the office today it begins with the nix that is to say network interface cards we'll be using intel x540 t2s but the only difference between it and the t1 being that it has two ports instead of well one and while any 10 gigabit card will knock the socks off of a gigabit one we chose these for two reasons one their intel which is basically the industry standard for prosumer network cards not to mention our testing with them has gone very well and two because they're both somewhat affordable at 300 bucks a pop on ebay although i got some of mine for cheaper and available in an rj45 equipped variant this is important because we wanted to use ethernet cables rather than the expensive sfp plus connectors and direct attach copper cables that we were using in our previous 10 gigabit setup the reason for that is that while that configuration worked well for us before starting out with pcs attached daisy chaining to each other actually then moving up to using the backbone links on a 48 port netgear gs752 txs switch it doesn't play nicely with running cabling through the walls uh definitely desirable for an office space and it's not scalable and if we want to run more pcs on 10 gig at a time we need a 10 gig switch with more ports and pretty much the switch right now if you don't want to spend an absolute fortune and you know then you might as well get sfp plus gear is the xs 712 t12 port or its eight port little brother from netgear and those use rj45 connectors all right so it's simple right plug in some ethernet cables and bippidybop boom you're transferring files at a thousand megabytes per second right actually not quite first you'll need to make sure that you're using cat6a cables if you want reliable data transfer over a reasonable distance and second and you may not have considered this but 10 gigabit is so fast that it exceeds the six gigabit per second limit of third generation sata so even if you have a wicked fast ssd drive you'll be limited to speeds in the neighborhood of 500 to 550 megabytes per second and while pci express ssds that overcome this bottleneck do exist i stole our intel 750 series and put it in my personal rig so i ended up using another solution i've got our 24 ssd storage server on one end the one that we built in this video here and i've got a test bench with that 128 gigabyte kit of dominator platinum ddr4 from corsair on the other end with a free and easy to use utility called soft perfect ram disc used to treat that ram like a hard drive so with such fast storage on either end it's much easier to evaluate the performance of the actual network link which frankly didn't go so hard on the first kick at the cam i mean i don't know who these people getting perfect 10 gig performance out of the box are or how many horseshoes they had to put up their butts to make them so damn lucky but i was seeing this weird cap at around 300 to 350 megabytes per second now to be clear that is still a significant improvement and already well worth the upgrade for our purposes but i wanted more damn it i paid for more and thanks to an amazing series of posts on the synovate blog which you should definitely check out we can link them below the video i was able to do much better than that mostly so the first tip from them was this great tool called nttcp that has a command line interface so not the friendliest thing but that they simplify by basically showing you where to plug in the program install path and machine ip addresses and boom it's off to the races so this tool revealed that my two machines were capable of more than one gigabyte per second performance between them so what gives well time to dig into the advanced settings to see if there's anything that we can tweak i started by enabling jumbo packets on all clients involved in the transfer and on my network switch side note here it doesn't seem to matter if the values don't match up exactly as long as your switch is set to something higher than your nics so this means that now effectively the data packets sent back and forth are bigger which is better for a high speed transfer of large files next i tweaked receive side scaling a feature that leverages more cpu cores for network transfers and i set it to match the settings with my number of logical processors on my pc so 16 on my 5960x test bench uh 8 on my 6700k test bench and 16 on my xeon server and finally i increased the size of both the send and receive buffers to their maximum this increases memory usage but can yield extra performance so then what did i get well performance wise over the original numbers in ntt tcp not much but my real world transfers were much higher in fact more higher than they should have been but i'm not going to complain and i was seeing sustained speeds of over double my original transfer rates with that said not all is necessarily rosy and for whatever reason maybe some of you sharp people out there can go ahead and contribute your comments below some transfers are faster or slower than others so i ended up actually putting together two test benches with brand spanking new installations of windows 10 and windows server 2012 r2 just for the sake of trying to eliminate as many variables as possible and i was still running into weirdness where one machine with a particular os would saturate the connection writing to the wanik ssd server but then be capable of half or 60 percent of that speed when reading from it and then another would saturate on reeds and then limp along on rights i mean that's the one you're looking at here by the way but as snake bitten as i seem to be when it comes to networking stuff limping along in this case is still 500 plus megabytes per second so i guess i'll just have to deal with my 34 gigabyte file transferring a little slower than it otherwise would overall very happy with the results and speaking of being happy with the results squarespace if you were thinking to yourself gee i'd like to build myself a website but i sure don't want to be unhappy with the results bam pick out a template on squarespace customize that template to build yourself whatever it is you're trying to build yourself you want to build a store a company website a you know menu a blog a portfolio use their simple templates and their powerful creation tools and their 24 7 tech support and it starts at only eight dollars a month so it's affordable you won't break the bank and i'm sure i have more talking points but i think you guys pretty much get the point you want to build an easy to use reliable website squarespace.com they've got a free trial which you can sign up for today and then if you end up liking the site that you create you can look into their affordable plans pretty freaking awesome there's no credit card required by the way to try out the trial so pretty cool when and if you decide to sign up for squarespace make sure though to use offer code linus and get 10 off your first purchase so that's it guys thanks for watching the video if you disliked it i think you know where that button is if you liked it though hit that like button hit that subscribe button unless you're already subscribed in which case please don't hit the subscribe button and maybe also consider supporting us by shopping at amazon with our affiliate link instructions up there or by what are the other things i'm sure there's other things right t-shirts and oh right monthly contributions to the forum you get a cool little contributor badge good stuff like that now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so go check out that little button in the top right corner for video x where i something i don't know we'll put something in there i forgot to fill it in on the script you10 gigabit networking i mean think about it transferring files around to remote pcs at speeds upwards of one gigabyte per second that's a thousand megabytes per second well today we're not only going to do it we're going to give you some tips and tricks that will hopefully help you out when the time comes to move to 10 gigabit yourself whether it's at work or at home and on the subject of work i thought to myself hey how about clearing some space on my desk at work by building a pc under the desk drop a like on the video if you're amped to see my upcoming desk pc build blog the master case 5 by cooler master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower pc case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories click on the link in the video description to learn more you know i still remember how mind-blowing it was like the first time that i saw something transfer over my network at 60 to 70 megabytes per second with the onboard gigabit lan port on some enforce board that i had then shortly afterward my mind was blown again when the pci bus bottleneck was removed and thanks to onboard pci express gigabit networking i could transfer files thanks to my trusty diamond max 9 120 gig raid 0 boot drive at over a hundred megabytes per second wow then for the last 10 years well it's as though time has pretty much been standing still i mean sure the enterprise space is getting 40 gigabit and 100 gigabit links but it really feels like about a decade ago the entire industry had a meeting and decided that yeah gigabit is good enough for consumers and small businesses and let's just leave it at that well i say no more we are using and i'm using this term fairly loosely here affordable hardware to go 10 gig at the office today it begins with the nix that is to say network interface cards we'll be using intel x540 t2s but the only difference between it and the t1 being that it has two ports instead of well one and while any 10 gigabit card will knock the socks off of a gigabit one we chose these for two reasons one their intel which is basically the industry standard for prosumer network cards not to mention our testing with them has gone very well and two because they're both somewhat affordable at 300 bucks a pop on ebay although i got some of mine for cheaper and available in an rj45 equipped variant this is important because we wanted to use ethernet cables rather than the expensive sfp plus connectors and direct attach copper cables that we were using in our previous 10 gigabit setup the reason for that is that while that configuration worked well for us before starting out with pcs attached daisy chaining to each other actually then moving up to using the backbone links on a 48 port netgear gs752 txs switch it doesn't play nicely with running cabling through the walls uh definitely desirable for an office space and it's not scalable and if we want to run more pcs on 10 gig at a time we need a 10 gig switch with more ports and pretty much the switch right now if you don't want to spend an absolute fortune and you know then you might as well get sfp plus gear is the xs 712 t12 port or its eight port little brother from netgear and those use rj45 connectors all right so it's simple right plug in some ethernet cables and bippidybop boom you're transferring files at a thousand megabytes per second right actually not quite first you'll need to make sure that you're using cat6a cables if you want reliable data transfer over a reasonable distance and second and you may not have considered this but 10 gigabit is so fast that it exceeds the six gigabit per second limit of third generation sata so even if you have a wicked fast ssd drive you'll be limited to speeds in the neighborhood of 500 to 550 megabytes per second and while pci express ssds that overcome this bottleneck do exist i stole our intel 750 series and put it in my personal rig so i ended up using another solution i've got our 24 ssd storage server on one end the one that we built in this video here and i've got a test bench with that 128 gigabyte kit of dominator platinum ddr4 from corsair on the other end with a free and easy to use utility called soft perfect ram disc used to treat that ram like a hard drive so with such fast storage on either end it's much easier to evaluate the performance of the actual network link which frankly didn't go so hard on the first kick at the cam i mean i don't know who these people getting perfect 10 gig performance out of the box are or how many horseshoes they had to put up their butts to make them so damn lucky but i was seeing this weird cap at around 300 to 350 megabytes per second now to be clear that is still a significant improvement and already well worth the upgrade for our purposes but i wanted more damn it i paid for more and thanks to an amazing series of posts on the synovate blog which you should definitely check out we can link them below the video i was able to do much better than that mostly so the first tip from them was this great tool called nttcp that has a command line interface so not the friendliest thing but that they simplify by basically showing you where to plug in the program install path and machine ip addresses and boom it's off to the races so this tool revealed that my two machines were capable of more than one gigabyte per second performance between them so what gives well time to dig into the advanced settings to see if there's anything that we can tweak i started by enabling jumbo packets on all clients involved in the transfer and on my network switch side note here it doesn't seem to matter if the values don't match up exactly as long as your switch is set to something higher than your nics so this means that now effectively the data packets sent back and forth are bigger which is better for a high speed transfer of large files next i tweaked receive side scaling a feature that leverages more cpu cores for network transfers and i set it to match the settings with my number of logical processors on my pc so 16 on my 5960x test bench uh 8 on my 6700k test bench and 16 on my xeon server and finally i increased the size of both the send and receive buffers to their maximum this increases memory usage but can yield extra performance so then what did i get well performance wise over the original numbers in ntt tcp not much but my real world transfers were much higher in fact more higher than they should have been but i'm not going to complain and i was seeing sustained speeds of over double my original transfer rates with that said not all is necessarily rosy and for whatever reason maybe some of you sharp people out there can go ahead and contribute your comments below some transfers are faster or slower than others so i ended up actually putting together two test benches with brand spanking new installations of windows 10 and windows server 2012 r2 just for the sake of trying to eliminate as many variables as possible and i was still running into weirdness where one machine with a particular os would saturate the connection writing to the wanik ssd server but then be capable of half or 60 percent of that speed when reading from it and then another would saturate on reeds and then limp along on rights i mean that's the one you're looking at here by the way but as snake bitten as i seem to be when it comes to networking stuff limping along in this case is still 500 plus megabytes per second so i guess i'll just have to deal with my 34 gigabyte file transferring a little slower than it otherwise would overall very happy with the results and speaking of being happy with the results squarespace if you were thinking to yourself gee i'd like to build myself a website but i sure don't want to be unhappy with the results bam pick out a template on squarespace customize that template to build yourself whatever it is you're trying to build yourself you want to build a store a company website a you know menu a blog a portfolio use their simple templates and their powerful creation tools and their 24 7 tech support and it starts at only eight dollars a month so it's affordable you won't break the bank and i'm sure i have more talking points but i think you guys pretty much get the point you want to build an easy to use reliable website squarespace.com they've got a free trial which you can sign up for today and then if you end up liking the site that you create you can look into their affordable plans pretty freaking awesome there's no credit card required by the way to try out the trial so pretty cool when and if you decide to sign up for squarespace make sure though to use offer code linus and get 10 off your first purchase so that's it guys thanks for watching the video if you disliked it i think you know where that button is if you liked it though hit that like button hit that subscribe button unless you're already subscribed in which case please don't hit the subscribe button and maybe also consider supporting us by shopping at amazon with our affiliate link instructions up there or by what are the other things i'm sure there's other things right t-shirts and oh right monthly contributions to the forum you get a cool little contributor badge good stuff like that now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so go check out that little button in the top right corner for video x where i something i don't know we'll put something in there i forgot to fill it in on the script you\n"