Hi there, note: I've send this email a couple of days ago, but it seems to be hanging around in a mail server ... I'm relatively new to freebsd (since 6.0rc), but not new to unix (first contact with unix was xenix286), since year 2000 working with gnu/linux (rock, gentoo). the machine is a pentium3 with 600MHz(or 650MHz?) and 256MB of ram, make.conf: newfw# cat /etc/make.conf CPUTYPE?=pentium3 CFLAGS= -O2 -pipe # added by use.perl 2006-03-10 14:11:48 PERL_VER=5.8.8 PERL_VERSION=5.8.8 now the problem: simple file transfer using scp screw up cpu load to near 100% by only using around 50% (around 5MB/s) of the bandwidth (100Mbit switched network), using http protocol with apache2 bandwidth utilisation increase to nearly 75% (around 7MB/s), ok scp is more cpu intensive. I've tried different settings, switch to device polling, reduce timer to 250Hz, switch on and of inflight, with only minimal difference in throughput. I've also tried different nics (xl, rl, sis) with little or now difference in performance, so I'm a little bit lost :-( With linux I've reached the pyhsical limits of the network with bot scp and http with much less cpu utilisation, so where are the correct "knobs" to adjust the system :-). I don't want to start a flame war and I like the network features of freebsd, so I want to use it for this kind of machines, but without the performance lack. regards manfred (odi)