Multicast support

[robinsmidsrod]

It does seem like you have a problem with your multicast setup. I suggest you look carefully at it again to ensure two machines can indeed do multicast between themselves without involving iPXE.

But I do think you might have a bottleneck in your network as well. If you're using 10 seconds to download 130MB, that means 13MB/s transfer rate, which is 104Mbit/s, which I'm going to assume is not a 100Mbit network, but gigabit, as you're not likely to get more than 100Mbit/s on a 100Mbit network (probably closer to 85-90Mbit/s even on a very tuned network). I'm therefore going to assume that you're using TFTP on a gigabit network instead. If you switch out that TFTP with a proper HTTP server and load the image using HTTP instead, you're more than likely to max out your network (especially if you serve that file from a server that has a decent cache and/or ramdisk). If you max out your network, you should be getting around 100MB/s in download speed, which should download that image in less than 2 seconds per machine. That should boot all of your machines in approx. 200 seconds, which is about 3 minutes. If you have your HTTP server connected to the gigabit switch with fiber (but all the clients using gigabit) I'm guessing you should be able to saturate a lot of them quite well. I'd try to serve the files using HTTP from a ramdisk first and see what kind of results that would get you.

If you're sanbooting, you might also find luck using AoE and vblade, as it works on a lower level and have less overhead. You just have to figure out where your bottleneck is. If it turns out to be Apache or IIS being slow, you should consider another web server software, e.g. nginx.