Over the years I have scrupulously adhered to the conventional wisdom that "spanning tree" is turned off on HPC switches. So that protocols don't time out in the time STP needs to acquire its model of network topology. But that does assume that there are no loops in the switch connectivity that can cause broadcast storms etc. Thereby constraining the network design to a loopless configuration. Most cases this is fine but.....
In the interest of latency minimum switch hops make sense and for that loops might sometimes provide the best solution. Just wondering what people think. Does STP enabled have other drawbacks aside from the initial lag on port activation? Or maybe all the latency advantage is always wiped out if the STP being on itself has some massive overhead. Do you always configure switches to not have loops? Or are loops ok and then I turn STP ON but just use PortFast to get away with the best of both worlds. -- Rahul _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
