I am trying to debug some new FC3 boxes and I am trying to figure out some issues that seem to be kernel related, but I could be barking up the wrong tree. Our current pcap collectors and NFS servers are Debian woody boxes with a mixture of unstable patches on them. We had some hard-drive failures, and I snapped on Fedora Core 3 with updates on those to a) because I had a hard time with Debian installer b) I wanted to get the systems for RHEL-4 when it comes out (to meet some security requirements we are being handed). The way the systems are set up at the moment are something like this [pcap collector] -------- [data analyzer] Debian FC3 All the network cards are E1000's and the link between the 2 boxes is a cross-over optic fiber link. The pcap collector grabs its data and then FTP's it over to the data analyzer every couple of minutes (the files are 6 to 15 gigabytes in size and NFS was too slow/borked when this was originally designed in 1999). If the connection goes down, the Pcap box spools them until the Analyzer is ready. The problem we are seeing is that when transferring multiple large and small files over to the Analyzer the FC3 box seems to get into dazed and confused mode. The vsftpd server accepts files at 30mb/s for a bit, then either stops all together or slows down to 200 kb/s and doesnt pick up. I have played with every option I can in the vsftpd configuration and cant find anything that makes a difference. The only issue I can find is that various kernel 'daemons' go into D state when this occurs (pdflush, kswapd, kjournald). A second 'related' issue is that I am trying to explain to the users why ping is so much slower than with Debian. The Debian NetKit ping will do a flood ping of 10000 1500sized packets in 30 seconds. The FC3 takes 3 minutes with what looks like some sort of backoff algorithm to play nicely. I am not sure if it is truely related, but the fellows who I am working with have been doing networking since 84 and it is not what they are wanting. Any help would be appreciated. Stephen -- Stephen J Smoogen. CSIRT/Linux System Administrator