Submission + - More bandwitdth or better utilization?
GuyverDH writes: Do we really need ever more bandwidth or should we better use what have?
After doing research into why transmissions of data over gigabit networks seem to only net marginal increases in throughput over 100Mbit networks, I was surprised to find a gentleman by the name of Phil Dykstra had already covered a lot of what I was looking for over 8 years ago...
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/jumbo.html
http://proj.sunet.se/lanng/lanng2000/gigabit_network_issues.html
Now, I don't proclaim to be a networking engineering guru, but just reading through those two articles would seem to imply that many corporations (and individuals) are paying for bandwidth that they aren't getting due to the fact that intermediate devices are set to use lower MTUs than they should be, introducing bottlenecks.
When sending packets between two networks, even if both ends made use of jumbo frames (9000 bytes), they would eventually switch down to 1500byte packets (or smaller if using encapsulation for encryption / vpn / other purposes).
I'm continuing to read up on the topics and so far it's proving to be an enlightening journey as it seems to me that we would be at least as well off, if we were to push the network carriers to replace devices restricting MTUs to 1500, with devices that at least allow jumbo frames, if not higher.
Reducing the number of packets that are required to send the same amount of data, would reduce the overall traffic and collisions, which in turn would allow even more throughput over the same connections.
After doing research into why transmissions of data over gigabit networks seem to only net marginal increases in throughput over 100Mbit networks, I was surprised to find a gentleman by the name of Phil Dykstra had already covered a lot of what I was looking for over 8 years ago...
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/jumbo.html
http://proj.sunet.se/lanng/lanng2000/gigabit_network_issues.html
Now, I don't proclaim to be a networking engineering guru, but just reading through those two articles would seem to imply that many corporations (and individuals) are paying for bandwidth that they aren't getting due to the fact that intermediate devices are set to use lower MTUs than they should be, introducing bottlenecks.
When sending packets between two networks, even if both ends made use of jumbo frames (9000 bytes), they would eventually switch down to 1500byte packets (or smaller if using encapsulation for encryption / vpn / other purposes).
I'm continuing to read up on the topics and so far it's proving to be an enlightening journey as it seems to me that we would be at least as well off, if we were to push the network carriers to replace devices restricting MTUs to 1500, with devices that at least allow jumbo frames, if not higher.
Reducing the number of packets that are required to send the same amount of data, would reduce the overall traffic and collisions, which in turn would allow even more throughput over the same connections.
