Recommended PCI gigabit ethernet card? OT: PC Gigabit Through put Question

[Tom Buskey]

On 6/15/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:
Interesting stuff I agree with deleted.....


Maybe engineering expectations have changed since the days of 10Mbit
> ETHERNET, but I do remember having those discussions with the
> engineering staff.



Sure, 10base ethernet gets bogged down when there are multiple connections
in the "ether".  The protocol says to talk.  If someone else is talking,
shutup for a random amount of time.  Then talk.  At a certain point you
saturate the ether.  IIRC anything over 70% utilization is the most you can
expect on the back of a napkin.

Switches isolate the traffic between nodes.

Token Ring and FDDI have a token that gets passed around.  You can't talk if
you don't have the token.  You only get to keep the token for a certain
length of time.  You'll get much closer to wire speed and have more
consistent performance.

100base ethernet mainly just drives the chips 10 times faster.  HP had
100baseT4 that was more like token ring IIRC.  It used 4 Cat5 pairs and
incompatible equipment.

For most cases, the shout/shutup/wait protocol works.

I'm not sure how gigabit is different, but it's not 100base ten times
faster.  For example there are not gigabit hubs.  They're all switches.

/me goes to google to update on gigabit while listening here ;-)
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