*BSD News Article 87724


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From: sthaug@nethelp.no (Steinar Haug)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Linux vs BSD
Date: 28 Jan 1997 21:07:30 GMT
Organization: Nethelp Consulting, Trondheim, Norway
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In-reply-to: Peter Mutsaers's message of Mon, 27 Jan 1997 22:09:58 GMT
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.networking:66476 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5775 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2089

[Peter Mutsaers]

|   On a very clean ethernet the maximum you can get is 10mbit/s /8 is
|   1.25mbyte/s. The maximum packet size is 1500 bytes, in this you have
|   overhead of at least 5 percent because of layer 2,3 and 4 headers (up
|   to TCP). So not counting the (quite large) overhead of fragmentation
|   (8k NFS packets get fragmented on ethernet) and NFS headers, e.g. a
|   plain FTP transfer, 1000kb/s is the absolute maximum.

Your figure of 5% overhead is about right (1538/1460=1.0534), but your
conclusion is wrong. That overhead means you still have a theoretical
bandwidth (not counting acks) of around 1159 kByte/s. According to
Vernon Schryver, the "speed of light" for TCP on Ethernet, if you can
avoid the capture effect, is around 1150 kByte/s.

I have measured 1100 kByte/s myself on an otherwise quiet Ethernet using
ttcp. I tend to believe my measurements - I've looked at the ttcp code,
and the measurement was easily reproducible.

Mind you, I haven't said *anything* here about NFS - this is all about
raw TCP bandwidth.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no