H. Spencer Young skrev:
>Can someone give me a quick primer on the advantages of switches vs. hubs on
>a small appletalk network with about 20 machines using file sharing?
Ethernet networks are very chatty by nature, without any particular
moderation, unlike Tokenring networks, where a token is passed around in a
ring-like fashion, alloting a slice of network time/bandwidth to each node.
Any Ethernet node will just "talk" when it feels like it, and if several nodes
happen to talk at once, they will have to step back and try to negotiate which
will talk first. This is called a collision, and disrupts network traffic. It
usually isn't as bad as it sounds, though.
On a two-node network, there are virtually no collisions, since any traffic
will be between the two nodes. In this case, a switch will help in no way.
When there are thirty nodes on the network, all speaking out loud, though,
there will be a lot of collisions and thus the effective throughput drops.
What a switch does is to analyse all incoming packets, look at their
destination, and then passing them on only two that particular node.
Effectively, the switch establishes a private Ethernet between the two nodes
involved, since their traffic isn't broadcast to all hosts on the network.
This minimises the amount of collisions, effectively splitting the network
into lots and lots of smaller nets.
The larger your networks grows, the more simultaneous traffic, and the more
collisions. Sooner or later, those collisions will have a serious impact on
your throughput, and you may feel as though you're on a two-megabit network
instead of a ten-megabit one. This is the idal application for a switch.
--
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