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philb19

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10GB switch - and increased speed

Hi,

Hypothetical. I have traffic utilization of 1GB NIC at say 20% average- bursting to max of 40%

I replace with 10GB switch and NICs. - Will I see improved speed and performance at all?

Or will I just use 2% of 10GB and max 4% of 10GB on a burst?

Can someone please give technical answer. I know there are other benefits to 10GB in consolidation of number of NICs required in VM environment etc - I'm purely after an explanation or confirmation of what performance/speed gain I will get given my current utilization Thanks
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Korbus

Your math is correct, assuming no change in traffic volume (200MB avg, 400MB max), you will simply see 2% avg and 4% max of 10GB after upgrade.
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ok thanks - so no performance gain whatsoever?
Well, It may be a mistake to assume constant traffic volume:  your computers can get and send responses faster-  thus they may generate MORE traffic per time unit.  Application specific, I guess.
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"your computers can get and send responses faster- "

ok this is getting to my point - How do they do this? so I assume the 10GB is not just the size of the pipe. Its pushing data faster due to the 10GB chipsets? so faster processing on the NIC and switch?
A "response" is a number of bytes in length, lets say 1KB.
With a 1GB network this data can be transferred in 1 milli seconds. (check my math)
With a 10GB network this 1KB can be transferred 10x faster, 0.01 milliseconds.

Note: 1 milisecond is a lot of time for a CPU to process a reply

Hmm, is that clear at all?
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ok thanks again. I have read online that 90% of SOHO business's run fine on 1GB full duplex LAN.

My issue is whether the network is "the bottlenecK' - And from my research with a small VLAN 20-30 PC 1GB full duplex - this is rarely the case.

The arguement from developers and DBA's is to get 10GB LAN. However I see only 30-40% utilization on 1GB - Now my assumption is that (we  do have Oracle)  the application layer - poor SQL coding is more than likely the cause of slow oracle business application performance rather than the LAN wire speed. - I'm trying to gauge whether 10GB will make any difference at all. I don't believe the clients are waiting for network - so what will 10GB give? though I could be wrong. - thoughts?
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Korbus

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Avatar of David Johnson, CD
you will see an improvement only if the network speed is your bottleneck.  Perhaps your bottleneck is somewhere else.

For instance, I noticed a huge improvement by putting my sql server data files, log files, temp files all on different spindles (physical drives), the log files went to an SSD, this resulted in a 400% increase on my System Center Server
I agree with David Johnson, CD, you will only see an improvement if the network is your bottle neck.

What is the time period you are seeing 30-40% network utilization?  Is this an 8 hour avg.?

Remember at any specific point in time a single network connection is either 100% utilized or 0% utilized.  As data is flowing over the wire it is traveling at 100% of the network connection maximum speed.  

An avg. tells you what percentage of the time the network was 100% utilized.    So network connection that is avg. 30-40% utilization is 100% utilized 30-40% of the time and zero% utilized 60-70% of the time.