On Friday 18 February 2005 21:16, Sandy Drobic wrote:
Helge Preuss wrote:
General questions: Is it possible to improve the server's network performance by adding a second GBit ethernet card? I think a PCI card is bound by the PCI bus performance. Would a second card, if PCI, even enhance performance noticeably? If I upgrade to PCIe, or use a mainboard with onboard GBit ethernet, would that change anything?
A correctly designed mainboard connects the onboard nic directly to the chipset, so you would get better performance with a mainboard that supports 2 GBit nics onboard compared to 2 PCI nics.
Sandy
Hi Helge, Sandy Are you sure the bottleneck is the NIC? (Don't get me wrong, it could very wel be the case, but..) I recall a discussion i had some years ago with a SUN-hw guru. For a certain customer i wanted to improve general response and i suggested to upgrade from 100BT to gigabit. He replied: nice gesture, but won't do much good. At SUN they performed some test and for (their 64-bit machines) the had a rule of the thumb: for every Mb you need a MHz, or the CPU can't cope. On peaks you might be able to generate enough (128MB/s) data, but not for longer periods. Adding a second NIC would not help, on the contrary... Having said that, 3 months ago, there was a review of Gb-nic's with appalling results. AFAIR pc-magazine or TOM'S review. Some couldn't even get beyond 500Mb... It made me decide to postpone an upgrade at home. Hans