Installing game with dhl_dumb through wifi vs. Cat5 cable

[ichibaka]

I've just recently tried installing game through hdl_dumb cuz I'm tired of taking my hdd in and out so often. At first I tried several games through Cat5 cable and my average speed is 560 KB/s through my desktop. Both the ps2 and the desktop are connected with cable through my wireless-g linksys router.

I'm certain my network sharing can transfer data at roughly 4000 KBps or 3.9 Mbps as I've always do with all my computers in the house. But it doesn't seem that way in this case so I'm really frustrated.

Anyway, yesterday I had just happened to borrow a game from my cousin and decided to install through my wireless laptop. I ripped the game to the laptop and connect with hdl_dumb and transfer like normal. Voila, I'm getting around 1.8 MBps = 1843.2 KBps. Now that's more like it, and it certainly is what my wireless connection can transfer data locally through network sharing.

So what seems to be the problem? Anyone tried this method or encountered similar situation?

[arcmpal87]

maybe they were some inference is going on when u transferring ur game through cat5 - firewall or antivirus or programs running on desktop and have low memory on ur pc i think hdl dumb require alot of memory...

[ichibaka]

Firewall might be an issue, but I have no antivirus running at all. And when I ran the installation on my desktop my pc was still running at top speed with little use of memory resources.

What is the speed you get when you tried it?

[b081]

Installations from ISO-images are much faster. Also you might try to tweak hdl_dumb's configuration, like moving that magic number there up or down a little ;-)

[XtreZ]

This one is going to run a little long

There are 2 types of Ethernet cards. 10BT and 100BT. In theory 10 BT will do nominally 10 megabits per second (about 1.2 Megabytes). 100BT will do 10 times that. However, when it comes to real world transfers, many other details are involved. If your ethernet card is set for say 10bt half duplex (which means it cant send and receive at the same time, it has to send data, then stop to receive) I will only do about 500 Kilobytes per second since troughput speed is usually cut in half. A tipycal wireless G router will do about 56 megabits per second. With the 1/2 rule and converting bits to bytes, you get about 3500 kilobytes per second in a best case scenario.

What does all this crap ammount to? Well I dont know in your Ps2, but in mine, the network card on it is only 10 BT. The most it could do is 1.3 MBps, however, working in half duplex I only get what u get, about 560KBps. Maybe using the wireless adapter you somehow achieved a full duplex connection to the PS2.

Between your computers you get a lot higher sharing speed since the ethernet cards are usually 100BT, again working half duplex you get about 4000KBps (althougn 50k/8 = 6.25, there is usually overhead and slowdown because of hdd writes and things like that, which only yields about 4-4.5k or so)

Another thing to consider is the CPU on your Desktop and the one on your laptop. Most people dont realize it but the bigger your CPU and memory are, the more total speed that can be achieved in point to point transfers. Maybe your laptop is faster than your desktop?

Also windows firewall has been know to slow down some types of transfers (eg mail connections).

I will try several things and see if I can duplicate your result. It should make for an interesting couple of hours

[ichibaka]

My laptop is a dell inspiron 6000 pentium m 1.6 ghz and desktop is a dell dimension 4300 p4 1.6 ghz, so maybe the desktop is slower. Don't know if video card might be a possible cause.

Another cool discovery I found is that I tried to connect a usb wireless adapter to my desktop in concurrent with the onboard lan connection, both connected to the same router. I did a transfer and got about 1.6 to 1.7 MB/s. Wireless signal on the adapter and router do not blink, so I think only Lan is transferring data. The weird part is I get this speed when I hook up the wireless usb adapter, but when I take it out the did another transfer the speed drop to half of that.

Could be a wireless advantage.