> Hi Rusty, > > Thanks for your advice. > No problem. Glad I happened to notice your reply, as I'm swamped with email ;-) > > At 09:55 AM 1/6/2002 -0700, you wrote: > >a switch as through a direct cable. The difference is in the short delay > >while the switch looks at the mac (and possibly) IP addresses in the > >packet before starting to send it along. (Assuming your switch does not > >hold the entire packet before sending it along - a bad thing if it does, > >'cause then its just a non-configurable router!). > > What are TRUE switch and pseudo-switch, example appreciated.
Well, a true switch will only pass broadcasts (and other packets for which the MAC destination is unknown to the switch) and packets destined for the MAC address sitting on the port to that port. A pseudo switch will send more than the minimum set of packets required (as I tried to 'list' in the previous paragraph). A switch which holds the entire packet before sending it along to the minimal set of destinations could be considered a true switch also, but its really functioning like a store-and-forward router, which is slower. None of these can be told by inspection of the box, eh? Maybe the documentation will tell, maybe not. And, admittedly, its somewhat esoteric and not REALLY important to most network setups that do not load their network much. But, if you CAN tell, at the store, which kind of switch you've got, get the fastest one ;-) > >... > >For raw speed, ftp has been, in my experience, the fastest, due to the > >lower overhead. However, its always good to do some experiments to > >see what's REALLY faster. Just beware of caching! > > Thanks. What is RAW speed ? Well, maybe I should have said 'pure speed'. I meant that, in my experience, and if you only consider file transfer speed, and not the time involved in setting up the transfer, then ftp has always been the fastest in all my experiments (which I have NOT run in some number of years!) On a side note, if you want unattended synchronization of files and/or directories, give rsync a look. It can be configured to only transfer the parts of files that have changed - so if you have a 200 meg file, and only 10 meg has changed, then it will transfer just the 10 meg (or so) thats different. (There are, of course, some caveats there - some of them being that you are trading network loading for time spent calculating CRCs of the files on both ends - but I've seen the amount of data needed to be sent be reduced from around a gig to around 10 meg! That makes the T1 linking these 2 machines together look like a 150Mb link! Sorta ;-) I think rsync might be on sourceforge, give http://www.freshmeat.net a search for rsync...) rc
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