[ipxe-devel] undionly.kpxe http download slow

[Levente LEVAI]

I have tried recently to use the kernel/initrd commands to
boot our system (kernel&initrd is fetched from an 'publicfile'
http server).

I found that the download is unduly slow. So I made a tcpdump of
the download (on the http server) and I found the amount of fetched
data per time unit decreasing exponentially with the total amount
data fetched upto a given time.

Just to illustrate things: I tried to boot with a single 20MB initrd
and also with the same initrd chopped into 20 initrds of size around
1MB. The difference is huge:
1x20MB initrd is fetched in about 80secs
20x1MB initrds are fetched in less than 5secs
(the system booted all right both way)

I have tried this with undionly.kpxe built from a stock version of
ipxe a few weeks ago.

Does anybody have an idea what's happening? Could this be a BIOS
PXE issue (unfortunately I have not tried with a native driver at the
time...)? Could this be some issue with the publicfile+ipxe combination?

/levente