what is line rate and what means non-blocking regarding switches

Hi, your question was not very specific bot is this the answer you were looking for:

Line Rate:
The data transmission speed of a communications line or network.

or

It indicates the actual speed with which the bits are sent onto the wire (and is thus also known as physical layer gross bit rate). The data transfer rate (commonly known as bit rate) is the transfer rate offered by the physical layer to the data link layer. If you want to be precise, you should call it physical layer net bit rate.


Non-Blocking:
Use a non-blocking (asynchronous) socket, which allows your application to respond to events. For example, when the remote system writes data to the socket, a Read event is generated for the control. Your application can respond by reading the data from the socket, and perhaps send some data back, depending on the context of the data received.

if i would have a 24gbit switch, would then be the line rate 24gbit? the line rate is associated with the actuall speed of the interface, right?

thanks guys for your help.

a 24 port gb switch would need to have a single backplane with a capacity of at least 24gb to be non blocking

Actually, it would need a 48gb backplane to be non-blocking (assuming that the ports could be full duplex).