In the past few months, I’ve been experiencing some intermittent network performance issue. I never spent much time on figuring it out as most of the time it manifest as XBox Live videos not streaming cleanly from the net to the XBox 360. I figure it must be a glitch with XBox Live or cable or wifey spamming large documents to her clients.
Today I was messing around with the network and pulled both NAS out of the closet. Needing some files off, I hastily hooked it up to my hub on my desk. While my daughter was playing around on the 360, I quickly noticed that the DNS was very busy with no one accessing it. A few more experiments on the 360 later lead me to one conclusion. The DNS-321 is actually a bad citizen on the LAN. It is very nosy about all the traffic on the network and very chatty also. I pulled out an old switch from my box of parts and replaced the hub and everything quiet down. The 360 streaming performance was back up to normal.
So the conclusion is that the only way to connect the DNS-321 is through a switch or a router. If you use a hub, the local traffic will slow to a crawl. I wish I still have my packet sniffer box so I can see what on earth it was doing… maybe when Windows 7 RC1 expires on the Mini 9, I’ll rebuild it into a Linux box and poke around some more…
