There are still collisions (of a sort) even on full-duplex switched networks. Two 10 Mbit devices can't talk full speed to the same 10 Mbit conversation partner, obviously. Store-and-forward switches and routers help with short-term congestion, but even without 2-to-1 bottlenecks, most switches can't maintain wirespeed on all ports simultaneously. Wirespeed routing with a Linux box isn't practical with real high-speed stuff, even dedicated hardware has trouble keeping up. (Even a big box would have trouble with more than 5 or 6 GbE cards, let alone 10 GbE.)
10 GbE actually has something along the lines of "padding" bits here and there in the middle of packets, not just between frames, so that they can be dropped (or added to, I think?) if the clocks on the two ends of the link aren't quite close enough - it's been a while since I worked on that hardware, so I don't remember very well. In any case, tuning your Ethernet is a valuable exercise for latency reasons, not just bandwidth reasons...both matter. I miss network hardware. :-) --DTVZ _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
