No. According to the USB spec, maximum allowed round-trip latency to any peripheral (regardless of the number of hubs) is 1.5 microseconds, many orders of magnitude below what a human being could sense. Electricity will propagate over a 32' cable in around 50ns, another couple orders of magnitude smaller still.

I have a hub attached to each one, with a cheap keyboard and a Logitech MX518 mouse. Guests are welcome to bring their own peripherals if they so choose.

The hubs are powered. They are USB 2.0, so they support many orders of magnitude more bandwidth than you could ever generate with a keyboard or mouse.

With all due respect, I think you're been fooled into believing the marketing of some companies that want to sell you expensive placebos. Keyboards are just not a significant source of latency in any gaming setup.

Yeah they all end up with the same machine name. I disabled automatic network discovery so they won't broadcast themselves, since it would just lead to confusion. File sharing can be done by copying files to and from a share on the server machine. I don't see why games would care since they operate at the TCP/IP level, not using computer names. I have only tested a couple things so far, though, like UT2k4... will be trying more today (LAN party!).

I'm bootstrapping gPXE using regular PXE.

I think you might be confusing iSCSI (a network protocol) with SCSI (a disk hardware interface). My physical disks are all SATA, and are a mix of SSD and HDD. The bottleneck is network bandwidth, so using SSD everywhere isn't going to improve performance much.

I'm not sure if you meant to say that you think this describes my girlfriend. But if so, that's extremely racist. Christina was born and raised in Boston. And I'm dating her because she's a gamer geek, not because she's Asian.

Thank you for your useful software! Sadly I'm no longer using pxelinux since I switched to Windows, but I believe I'm still using your TFTP server. :)

Monoprice sells 32' USB extensions that have a repeater on the end. I'm not sure how they get away with just one repeater instead of two as seems mandated by the USB spec, but they do and it works.

Yes, that's what I have. The 40Mbps dual-line "Fusion". Due to distance from CO, it gets 32Mbps, but it is a consistent 32Mbps.

No, it really does not do anything like what I'm doing... and anyway, setting this all up was lots of fun.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. How is 32 less than 6?

A typical Comcast package appears to be 15mbps, according to their site. Comcast Business Class does offer pretty good bandwidth, though.

Yeah. I actually learned this after having purchased only one 3-pack, but went ahead and bought three more 3-packs just to be legal. With this much attention paid to my setup, I don't want to be caught pirating.

Indeed, as mentioned in the blog, I was at one point trying to develop a UDP-based blog device protocol that would broadcast blocks back, on the assumption that all the machines would be loading the same data at the same time. However, when I got the system up and running without that, and didn't see any performance problems, I decided to abandon that idea and focus efforts elsewhere.

I couldn't imagine it either, but it turns out it works fine. Obviously the load times aren't blazingly fast but no one has ever complained about them being slow either.

Note that most games load all data upfront. Once they've done that, the game runs without doing much I/O.

Also note that an iSCSI image can be fully cached client-side, so if you load the same game twice, it's probably going to load directly from RAM the second time. (Most games are 32-bit so there's a good 4GB of RAM in the machines doing not much other than disk cache.)

Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing -- PXE-booting the whole OS over iSCSI. I'll edit to make that clearer.

Honestly I'm kicking myself for not having written everything up before going public. The vast majority of people who saw the original post will not see the technical details. :/