🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <siegman-212608.14412512082008@news.stanford.edu>,
 AES <siegman@stanford.edu> wrote:

> I recently configured an Airport Express unit as a client on our home 
> Airport system (complete setup summarized below).  
> 
> The instant we began playing music from one of our laptops to our living 
> room stereo system through this AE client, doing so seemed to soak up 
> essentially all the bandwidth capacity of our Airport base station -- 
> connections from a second laptop thru the Airport LAN to the Internet 
> slowed to a crawl.  
> 
> Is this normal?  Or do we need to upgrade part of our setup?
> 
> Full setup:
> 
> AT&T DSL comes into house through a Cayman 3220-H modem/router unit (DSL 
> installation is very low data rate, maybe 130 KB, due to 25,000 foot 
> distance to local office; Cayman router is ancient, was part of original 
> installation 7 or 8 years ago)
> 
> One of the Cayman's 4 ports goes to Airport Extreme base station that's 
> a year or so old via 100' of Cat 4 cable; second port goes to an 
> Ethernetted printer; third and fourth ports not connected.
> 
> Airport Express unit is new; I configured it as a client on the Airport 
> Extreme network following instructions in user's guide.  Nothing except 
> an audio cable to the stereo system is connected to it.
> 
> Music source is iTunes on a MacBook Pro running OS 10.5; second laptop 
> is MacBook running OS 10.4.  Both laptops see the Airport Express as a 
> remote speaker choice in iTunes speaker selection menu.
> 
> Observed behavior is that Internet response time for second laptop 
> attempting to read email with Eudora or surf with Safari drops to a 
> crawl as soon as first laptop starting sending music through the AE unit.

I'd suspect that one or more of your links has a very high error rate 
(possibly due to inadequate wiring), and that necessitates a lot of 
packets having to be resent. That would lower the effective data rate, 
perhaps by a lot.

I've seen a situation where the boxes at both ends of a link were 10/100 
MBit autoselect but the cable in between could not quite handle 100 MBit 
Ethernet signals. The Boxes would negotiate a 100 MBit link and then 
spent all their time doing retries. Took a while to find, because the 
link didn't just fail, but just ran very slowly. Inserting a 10 MBit 
*only* hub into the link forced the negotiation to default to the 10 
MBit rate, and throughput increased greatly.

Isaac