On 26-Aug-2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Which is more efficient: > > Using two ethernet cards, each with their own IP address, and each running a > DIFFERENT server application, or ONE card running both? >
Hard to answer this. What you are really asking here is if adding a second card will enable you to read and write more packets on the network. >From the hardware side, is one card generating lots of interupts more or less efficient than 2 cards generating the same number of interupts total. Does the fact that in the two card case the PCI bus will be handling data from two places versus the one card case. Several other considerations too. Best thing would be to setup a test box and see. At my last job we found that it was packet routing that helped more. We had two ethernet cards in each box, one card on the network that talks to the outside and one on the inside. This way internal admin traffic, updates, and office access did not affect the bandwidth available to outside people. In the end networking is all about how the network is being used. Latency v. bandwidth utilization. CPU work v. I/O work. etc.
