Very slow network on RiscOS/Pi?

Greetings all! First post and everything. Anyways:

I’ve recently gotten myself a Raspberry Pi, flashed the latest RiscOS image onto an SD card and am very happy to go around exploring this (to me) completely unknown OS. And it makes me quite happy. However, there is a problem, and that is the network.

I have a proper Ethernet cable attached to the socket on the Pi, and I have no problem using the ‘net if I run Raspbian (that is how I am writing this now), but it quite simply won’t work under RiscOS. Or, well, it works, somehow: I get a net connection, and I can run NetSurf and get to google and so on, but it is v e r y s l o w. Slow enough to make it almost impossible to use these forums (I get SSL timeouts all the time), and my attempt to get something using !PackMan was finally aborted, after I had left it overnight and got down in the morning to a progress bar that had advanced to abouts the 2/3 mark.

A bit of ping from the * prompt tells me that I have a packet loss of 20-30%, which does explain why stuff doesn’t work. However, from Raspbian I get absolutely no packet loss and a quite comfy net experience.

So: Is this an expected problem? I guess not, since I see several people who claim to be able to use the net fairly comfortably, at least. The bet is on me having messed up something somewhere. Being a complete RiscOS newcomer, I really don’t know where to start looking, though.

Any ideas?

Welcome to the world of RISC OS.
I was going to say that it is probably the same problem as here:
“USB outbound SLOW on Raspberry Pi”
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/1893

The Network interface on the Pi connects to the Pi’s on board USB hub. So slow USB outbound = slow outbound network.

Your problem seems to be more receiving data. One poster who had even worse USB than most found he had an incompatibility with his network switch ¹. So it may be worth trying another if you can.

Don’t worry it is very unlikely to be inexperience.

¹ You’d think that any Pi Ethernet Interface to Switch problem would be OS independent but empirical evidence says it can.

Hehe :) Whilst waiting for anybody to pick up the thread, I did some experimenting, and lo and behold! I got it to work just now, ten minutes after you wrote your post (and five minutes before I read it).

I did more forum searching and came upon a thread where someone had the same problem as me – Extremely slow downloads, too – but had fixed it by changing the cable. Now, doing a quick changing of the cable in question would be a bit difficult (It passes through walls), but since I eventually will run through a switch, I thought “Well, let’s hook up the switch and another, shorter cable – It can’t get much worse”, and hey presto – Excellently working, quite speedy network!

The original cable is rather long, so I suppose that the Pi is a bit marginal trying to drive it, but with a switch as a powered signal booster inbetween, it works a lot better :)

Now, why it would work better in Raspbian…But nevermind, apparently a Heisenberg error. Everything works! Celebration! :D

How curious – I’ve changed the “Real Name” field (from “Johan Gustavsson” to “Moxie”), and apparently the forum software does not track that. Interesting. Well, the ID number after the name ought to identify myself as the same person, anyway :)

How curious – I’ve changed the “Real Name” field (from “Johan Gustavsson” to “Moxie”), and apparently the forum software does not track that. Interesting. Well, the ID number after the name ought to identify myself as the same person, anyway :)

Unfortunately you lose ownership of your posts which is why I’m still Frederick instead of Fred.

Networking on my BeagleBoard with RISC OS is horribly slow too..
Somehow the USB network adapter does not get beyond 600KB/sec or so.
Which is ok for the webserver that runs on it but hardly useable for the NFS shares.
Still hoping for some improvement in the throughput some day. :-)