Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!pacbell!unet!billp From: billp@unet.UUCP (Bill W. Putney) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: How would *you* upgrade this network? Keywords: ethernet, FDDI, Proteon, TCP/IP, Bridge, Sun Message-ID: <123@unet.UUCP> Date: 6 Oct 88 18:58:19 GMT References: <281@fed.FRB.GOV> Reply-To: billp@unet.PacBell.COM (Bill W. Putney) Organization: Network Equipment Technologies, Redwood City, CA Lines: 25 In article hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: > >Also, you should take a look at broadcast rates on your networks. >You've got a big network using only bridges. Since you have a limited >number of vendors, and probably one group responsible for maintaining >the stuff, this may be OK, but you're beginning to be near the upper >bound of the size network I'd construct without some real routers to >keep the broadcast traffic confined. Make sure you don't run rwhod or >anything else that routinely broadcasts. > Just a short note re: my experience with a net much like the one described. I have about 250 Suns (mostly diskless stations), 300 P.C.'s running TCP/IP and about 300 terminals on LS/1's. I have concidered changing some of our bridges to routers because of possible broadcast traffic load. When I recently got a Sniffer and set it up to look only at broadcast/multicast packets I was surprised to find out how little bandwidth and packet rate was attributable to these packet types. I haven't seen the numbers, but I bet routers have more delay and a lower (in general) throughput than would a bridge from the same supplier. I also have a couple of devices around that arn't TCP/IP and MAC layer bridges means never having to say your sorry. -- Bill Putney