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MBP Ethernet vs Apple Thunderbolt 27" Ethernet Performance Disparity

A

appletechpro

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 26, 2012
111
0
Has anyone else noticed or able to test the difference in download speeds when their ethernet connection is connected to either their MBP itself or a connected Apple Thunderbolt display?

I have a 2011 2.0 i7 15.4" MBP, and when I use the onboard ethernet port I get 28 Mbps.

When I use the ethernet port on the back of my Thunderbolt display connected to my MBP, I only get 3 Mbps.

Any ideas?
 
Do you have any other things like USB, FireWire, daisy chained Thunderbolt devices connected to the display? I'm not sure if having one of those connected would seriously hog the Thunderbolt bandwidth.
 
Sorry, I forgot to mention that I have no other Thunderbolt devices connected.

The only devices connected are a USB keyboard, etc.

Nothing that would come near to taking 10 Gbps...
 
You could get more speed over Wifi.
If that measurement is correct I would complain to Apple. There is nothing you could possibly do about it yourself.
 
Sounds like a hardware problem in your ethernet cable or the display itself (I'm assuming 28 Mbps is near the limit of your internet connection).
 
d00d said:
Sounds like a hardware problem in your ethernet cable or the display itself (I'm assuming 28 Mbps is near the limit of your internet connection).
Click to expand...

I get 60 Mbps on both my mbp w/tbd, and my mini w/tbd, and 60Mbps when connected directly in the mbp/mini
 
gjwfoasfsaevg said:
First of all you guys should clarify whether you are talking about MByte/s or Mbit/s.
Click to expand...
Lower case "b" is bit and as an informal convention, most people usually use slightly different notation for the two (MB/s vs Mbps).

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Skjetne said:
I get 60 Mbps on both my mbp w/tbd, and my mini w/tbd, and 60Mbps when connected directly in the mbp/mini
Click to expand...
Now I'm a little confused. I thought you said the MBP gets 28 Mbps with TBD and 3 Mbps with onboard.

I'd first eliminate the possibility of the cable being the problem (swap it).

Second, when you say you get 60 Mbps above, did you mean machine to machine? (60 Mbps is really low, especially for a gigabit ethernet connection.) How did you test this?

Third, if you get these problematic results only when using the internet, you might investigate your network interface configuration. Changing MTU and other low level settings (some tools like Cocktail, Onyx, etc. have options that "optimize" these) can sometimes, depending on your router and other factors, actually make performance really awful (for example, increasing the size of the MTU can boost speed on an internal network, but cause excessive fragmentation in routers elsewhere externally).
 
Skjetne said:
I'm not the one with the problem. I just tested my setup as a favor for OP :)

60Mb/s is my internet speed i.e. speedtest.net
Click to expand...
Ha, I got confused and thought you were the OP when I posted that. Ooops.

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appletechpro said:
Thanks for the help everyone -- turned out to be ID-10-T error and all is well now!
Click to expand...
Huzzah, and thanks for introducing me to ID-10-T. I've used PEBKAC for years and never heard that one.
 
Skjetne said:
You have to say what you did wrong! We be wondering..
Click to expand...

I was running speedtest.net and apparently chose the wrong mirror on the Thunderbolt display, so I was seeing speed test results from two different servers. :p
 
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