On Sun, 24 Apr 2011, Jim Green wrote: > I have a asus p8p67 deluxe board and it has two nics and two ports, I > am thinking of bonding them to one nic, but I only have one cable so > will only use one port. Will this do much help to the > throughput/speed? If I have two cables connecting to both ports I > think it will definitely help, but here I only be using one cable/one > port and two nics bonded to one virtual nic.
Your board has Realtek 8111Es for NICs. I won't sugar-coat it: that stuff cannot be called good gigabit ethernet NICs in any way. Its only saving grace is that it is dirty cheap. Try to get jumbo frames working on your network, it should help you get better throughput _if it works right_. You just have to set the MTU to the *same jumbo frame size* on *every host on your network* to enable that. But make sure your switch can handle jumbo frames first, and that such support is enabled. Example jumbo MTU sizes: 9000, 7200, 4000. Which one you can reliably use depends on the least capable device in your network and their bugs. I would expect bonding to actually make things worse with r8169-based NICs, but maybe it would distribute the interrupts better and give you better performance at the cost of wasting even more CPU resources. This is only cost-effective if you happen to have a gigabit managed switch capable of link bonding (LACP) already, or when directly connecting two computers. Bonding with just one cable simply doesn't help performance. Either the devices notice the missing link and disable the offending ports (and you'll be slightly worse off than you'd be without any bonding in the first place), or you will have the packet loss from hell. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110425133254.ga18...@khazad-dum.debian.net
