Ethernet Flowcontrol...

[Bill Northrup]

Hello everyone. I was just about to begin some network tuning and wanted
to get some input from the list. We have a few gig devices that talk to
other gig devices as well as the lesser Fast Ethernet nodes. I am well
aware of the gig frame padding, latency and such with gig e. However I
was wondering if anyone is using flow control both rx and tx or asym to
help with packet flow? For instance I have a gig master that is trying
to shove everything down a fast e pipe at the switch. Should one just
enable TX flow control on the gig segment? The other way from fast e to
gig e wouldn't be an issue, right? Does relying on the network for flow
control reduce the overhead encountered on any of the machines or
possibly off load it to the network devices that may do it better? I'll
report back to the list what I find, but everyone's mileage is
different.

Thanks

Bill