Ethernet Performance

By Dan DiNicolo, February 26th, 2007 Posted in Ethernet. Subscribe to our RSS Feed

Ethernet networks tend to be susceptible to performance problems as they grow, based on the CSMA/CD method of media access that they use. While implementing Layer 2 switching goes a long way towards better Ethernet performance, there are still a number of issues to consider when an Ethernet network begins to experience performance problems. Examples of reasons for congestion on Ethernet networks include having too many hosts on a given segment, not enough bandwidth available, broadcast storms, along with excessive broadcast or multicast traffic.

A few key metrics are used by Cisco to help decide when an Ethernet network is not performing at an appropriate level. These include:

• Network utilization. A network utilization of over 40% on shared Ethernet segments represents that the network is saturated.

• Broadcasts/multicasts. No Ethernet segment should have more than 20% combined broadcast and multicast traffic.

• CRC Errors. There should be less than 1 CRC error per MB of network traffic.

• Collisions. Less than 0.1% of network packets should be involved in collisions

While this data may seem difficult to obtain, a variety of network management tools can provide these particular metrics, along with many others. Examples include CiscoWorks and Cisco Netsys Performance Service Manager.

Written by Dan DiNicolo - Visit Website

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