Re: recommandations for a home Gigabit switch

Jerry McBride wrote:
John-Paul Stewart wrote:

General Schvantzkoph wrote:
On Sat, 19 May 2007 12:12:46 -0700, neuneudr wrote:

Hi again,

I'm looking for a relatively cheap Gigabit switch for my home network.
[snip]
So basically all I need is a switch, preferably with 16 ports (I've got
several PCs and two network printers). I'm on a budget and although I'm
usually not a huge Dell fan (I have one LCD from Dell bought 4 years ago
and that's it), I was thinking of this :

99 Euros (around $130 USD) : PowerConnect 2716

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/
pwcnt_2716?c=uk&l=en&s=bsd&cs=ukbsdt1
I think it's manufactured by HP.
[snip]
I've got a couple of 8 port Netgears and an 8 port Dlink, they work fine.
I see that the Netgears are available for less than $50 on Newegg, there
is a Dlink for $40.
I, too, use an 8 port D-Link gigabit switch. It was quite cheap when I
bought it 4 years ago. It's adequate, but that's about all I can say
about it. It doesn't support jumbo frames and doesn't have any sort of
management features whatsoever. If I were to purchase another GigE
switch, even for home use, I'd definitely want it to support jumbo
frames. The Dell unit mentioned by the OP does, and appears to have at
least some management features too. Personally, I'd tend to favour the
Dell for those reasons over the cheap D-Link that I currently use.

Just curious... John-Paul... but how much performance boost would you expect
with being able to setup for jumbo frames? Something like that would
require nics that support jumbos also... Sounds a bit expensive, but if the
performance increase is great enough, maybe it'd be worth the cost.

My NICs (nice Intel ones) already support jumbo frames, so the cost of upgrading isn't that big a deal (new switch only).

Why I'm interested is that I see 25-100% CPU usage on a 1.0 GHz P-III system that I use as a file server, when transferring files over NFS or FTP. According to 'top' most of that is 'system' time which I presume means it is largely time that the CPU is spending servicing interrupts from the NIC. (This level of CPU usage does not happen when transferring files locally, so I do believe it to be network-related rather than disk-related.) Transfer rate is around 10-12 MB/sec with files on the order of 100 MB and drops even further to <2 MB/sec on multi-gigabyte files while the load average goes through the roof.

From what I've read, jumbo frames would help a lot with this situation.

(On a 3.0 GHz P4 system I see up to 25% 'system' CPU usage when transferring large files across the network.)
.

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