Decent performance from Realtek

[Yorick]

... which, after telling all and sundry to go use an Intel NIC already, comes as somewhat of a surprise. Granted this is a send/recv of large files - still, that's wire speed on the receiving end. I'm repurposing my 8-year-old desktop as a temporary TrueNAS boxen so I can get my data off and rebuild my raidz2 as 8-wide instead of 5-wide.

Go figure. It can work. I expect it'll depend on exact Realtek chip, a lot.

Code:

Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 09)

 

[ornias]

Go figure. It can work. I expect it'll depend on exact Realtek chip, a lot.

Never had problem with not hitting 1gbps... Did with reboot issues and connection dropping under some loads though....
Realtek problems are not just limited to speed issues sadly enough...

 

[Ericloewe]

Realtek is difficult to deal with for a number of reasons:
The de-facto standard RTL8111 has a veritable alphabet soup of variants. The E is most popular, but many others coexist in products new and old. How do they differ? I'd be mildly surprised if Realtek knew.
You can get the hardware to work, but it takes CPU time to do weird stuff that more expensive (I'll note that an Intel I210 is like two bucks more) NICs don't require. The original 10/100 models had screwed up DMA, for instance.
To do that, however, you need to know what you're dealing with. Realtek is widespread, so enough people have bitten the bullet and worked on the driver to make a usable thing.