File transfer - Bandwidth dropping down, following a pattern

This is what I get from the destination server while transferring a huge file to it over the LAN.

The screenshot has been taken during the file transfer, I did not paused anything, the transfer was going on during all the time.
In the Windows file transfer pop up window, the ETA shown goes from 4 minutes to something like 138 minutes then gets back to 3 minutes, then 200 minutes, so on so forth.

enter image description here

It follows a pattern! The link utilization drops to 0% following a pattern, and then gets back to 40%.

Its like if something on either the source machine or the destination machine runs automatically and eats up all the disk i/o...

Only a Dell PowerConnect with the latest firmware version sits between the two hosts.

asked Dec 7 '11 at 18:41

74% accept rate

	Someone else asked a similar question to this recently. Huge file=? Is the screenshot of the sender or receiver? What is the senders CPU utilization? – dbasnett Dec 7 '11 at 18:47
	35GB, the screenshot is from the receiver, and the CPU utilization on both hosts is just fine. – Jonathan Rioux Dec 7 '11 at 18:54
	How fast is the link between the devices? What about memory utilization? I'd guess that the one end has just fallen behind and all is well. Overall, does the file transfer successfully and how long does it actually take? – dbasnett Dec 7 '11 at 18:59
	It's a GigaEthernet LAN, memory utilization on both hosts is just fine also. And yes, the file transfer has been successful, but the transfer speed was sometimes very slow as you can see on the graph, so it took longer. In total, it took maybe 20 minutes or so... – Jonathan Rioux Dec 7 '11 at 19:03
	Are the interfaces showing any errors? – dbasnett Dec 7 '11 at 19:14

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