Thus said Tod Hansmann on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:18:47 MST: > It's a Netgear GS108t-200NAS, if I recall correctly (I'm not currently > at the office). I'm actually not too worried about the flooding of the > switch, as we're only sending 8 MB/s max from the server. Sometimes > far less (3 MB/s) and we get pause frames not based on the server's > state, but the clients' states.
It might only be 8MB/s, but what is the size of your packets? If they are 512 byte UDP datagrams, then that's between 6,144 and 16,384 packets per second. Are you sure that Netgear can handle that? If the packet size is even smaller, then increase the PPS and ask again. How big is the buffer for forwarding packets on the switch? The specs don't seem to give these details, but I'm not surprised about that for a $100 switch. What about the rest of the infrastructure? I've never been impressed with Netgear. They're cheap and poor performers. I wouldn't even recommend them in a home, and definitely not in a business. But, it's also interesting your point about the clients sending the pause frames. Are they not able to handle the packets? If a client sends pause frames, that could possibly impact all clients, because there is only one server, and ethernet frames will slow for *all* clients, not just the one that sent it, if I'm not mistaken. Andy /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
