Re: Collisions on lan using Linux versus Windows
Robert Ian Smit said:
> I suppose so. Is it still true that on a busy lan you only get 40% or
> less troughput? The guy who told me this years ago said that
> ethernet was dead and tokenring the thing to have since you're
> throughput would always be near 100%. Aesthetically ethernet was
> never a thing of beauty, but it's cheap and it works.
depends entirely on the indivual network:
1) quality of cables(and how they are run, if there is much interference
on the line). Poorly made homemade cables can kill performance. A few years
ago I worked for a company and we did cables inhouse, the guy that did them
swore that the cables did not have to be crimped according to spec so he
crimped them all straight through wire-for-wire. This worked for most cases
but sometimes network connectivity was very sporatic, especially on long
runs. I got on the phone with blackbox thinking it was bad/cheap cable and
they talked me out of buying their products and instead to crimp according
to the spec in the back of their catalog(I love blackbox!)
2) quality of the switches/hubs
3) backplane of the switches/hubs(e.g. my 48port switch at home can
sustain 17Gigabits/second of traffic, which is enough for all 48 ports
to be sending and recieving at the same time at wire speed, plus the
2 gigabit(4, but 2 are redundant) ports sending and recieving at the
same time.
4) speed of the computers(ram, cpu, hd)
5) quality of the networking stack of the OS on those computers
6) quality of the network cards and drivers on those computers
7) quality of the networking software on those computers
the list goes on ........in a perfect enviornment you should be able
to see near wire speed with protocols that have low overhead(e.g. ftp),
high overhead protocols like SMB will go much slower, even SCP is
slower(not as slow as SMB in my experience).
I did some tests a while back and the fastest performance I saw on
a 100mbit NIC was about 11mbyte/second on a 100mbit NIC transferring
a large(500+MB) file via ftp.
at my office, until I took the network apart, we had about 45 servers
in 1 room, as well as 40-50 other systems throughout the office, the
backbone was plain ol 100mbit ethernet. No gigabit, no fiber.. and during
the course of the year and a half I monitored the switches, MRTG *NEVER*
showed sustained traffic above 5Mbyte/s, even during our busiest hours.
Most of the time traffic was in the range of 200-500kbyte/second.
nate
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