Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: LAN speed?????
Message-ID: <1990Apr13.044345.27139@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <19603@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <7301@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 90 04:43:45 GMT

In article <7301@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM> arnief@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Arnie Frisch) writes:
>The thru-put of ethernet is much lower than 10 megabits per second
>because of protocol and SW overhead.  An excellent system can run at 1
>megabit persecond.  Most workstations run at 100 to 300 kbits per
>second.

I guess that depends on whose workstations one is using :-), and on who's
writing the software.  Van Jacobson can drive an Ethernet to saturation
sending data from one Sun-3/50 to another with TCP/IP.  The net data
rate is 6-7 Mb/s, as I fuzzily recall, after you subtract the bit times
needed for headers etc. for TCP, IP, and Ethernet itself.

This is obviously not done with a stock SunOS TCP/IP :-), but it's *not*
a specially-cooked benchmarking-only implementation.  That man really
knows how to speed up protocol processing.

It used to be common wisdom that 1 Mb/s was about tops per host.  It's
not true any more.
-- 
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