Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: Ethernet Error Rate Message-ID: Date: 11 Mar 88 18:00:28 GMT References: <66@dogie.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 18 Ethernet error rates, in terms of CRC, framing, etc., are generally very low. On some of our very heavily loaded networks (lots of diskless Suns) our cisco gateways (Interlan Multibus controllers) and a Sun 4 (Sun's own controller, but note that both the Interlan and Sun controller use the Intel Ethernet chip, so you'd expect their low-level Ethernet handling to be similar) see input errors at the rate of about 3 per million. Output errors are a bit more common, but an output error probably isn't an error of the sort you meant. On our network it most typically means that the system had to try more than N times to get a packet out onto the network, because it was jammed. I see these only on networks with high collision rates, and even there the largest number I see is around 1 in 10,000 packets. This is on a network with an average 10% collision rate, which indicates that it is far too heavily loaded. (We're in the process of splitting it into multiple Ethernets.) Note by the way that collisions are not errors. They are a normal part of the operation of the Ethernet protocol. Collision rates of a percent or so are perfectly normal. However our 10% figure indicates that our network is too heavily loaded.