tcp/ip - BAD performance

[Jeffery Small]

I have a 3B1 (2-Mb RAM, 67-Mb Disk, 2 serial expansion boards and 1 ethernet
board) running 3.51a OS.

This machine has performed like a champ until I recently installed the TCP/IP
software and the ethernet board.  Now what I am finding is that the machine
is thrashing around whenever it tries to do some CPU-intensive task like
uncompressing the news.  An uncompress task which use take 5 minutes might now
take 10-15 minutes!  

I have killed off all unnecessary daemons like sendmail and fingerd but have
not noticed any real improvement.

The disk is running with about 16-20 Mb free most of the time, however it has
recently been filled up with news to within 4-5 Mb of capacity.

So my questions are: 1- Could this performance problem be primarily related
to disk fragmentation and I need to reformat and reload the works, and 2- are
there any tuning tricks which can be performed on the TCP/IP implementation to
speed things up?

Thanks for any pointers you can offer.
--
Jeffery Small    (206) 485-5596            uw-beaver!uw-nsr!uw-warp
C. Jeffery Small and Associates                                    !cjsa!jeff
19112 152nd Ave NE - Woodinville, WA  98072           uunet!nwnexus