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Surprisingly slow throughput on GigE ports of GS110EMX
I have a pair of NETGEAR GS110EMX switches, one connected via port 10 to the 2.5Gbps port of an Orbi RBRE960 router, and the second connected "back to back" to the first switch through their 10Gbps p...
Flow control! It was always FLOW CONTROL.
After GPTing around looking for a solution, I decided to try enabling port-based flow control on the upstream (10Gbps) port, thinking perhaps, as I mentioned above, that I was experiencing buffer overflows downstream to the GigE port. Sure enough, with Flow Control enabled on the higher speed interface, I'm now getting 960Mbps on the lower speed GigE port.
I really, really wish I'd have tried that before ripping the house apart, and purchasing another 8-port 10GigE switch. Ah well. Lesson learned. Hopefully this will help someone else out in the future.
<RANT>
Coming from a commercial networking world, I'm surprised and a bit disappointed that the NETGEAR switch just doesn't "work" out of the box. Perhaps with a 10:1 port speed mismatch, flow control is the only solution.
</RANT>
– Dave
The documentation on the switch is very clear.
Manage flow control
Flow control works by pausing a port if the port becomes oversubscribed. It drops all
traffic for small intervals of time during the congestion condition. You can enable or
disable IEEE 802.3x flow control. By default, flow control is disabled.
Take it that enabling flow control per default is a bad advise. No unmanaged switch on this world does it, some poorly designed/implemented/tested switches fail filtering the pause (stop) frame, and are re-distributing it over all connected devices. According to my small experience, many systems on this planet (and up to the lower orbit) deployed in enterprise applications don't do flow control by default, (old DEC, IBM AIX, ...) regardless of the speeds supported - certainly not on Ethernet ports. Of course, enabling flow control on these switches makes sense in certain applications. Very different when it comes to the now more or less legacy serial consoles, where XON/XOFF is indeed the de-facto default. There I can strongly agree.
schumaku wrote:The documentation on the switch is very clear.
Manage flow control
Flow control works by pausing a port if the port becomes oversubscribed. It drops all
traffic for small intervals of time during the congestion condition. You can enable or
disable IEEE 802.3x flow control. By default, flow control is disabled.
Yep, I know how flow control works, and that it was an option. I just didn't think the switch would not be able to handle the 10:1 packet forwarding by default, instead relying on the user having to enable 802.3x on all upstream higher speed ports. Flow control on all ports, all the time, is sub-optimal, but for a switch touted as being able to support 100Mbps all the way up to 10Gbps, you'd think it'd "just work".
ANYway, problem solved, so I'm happy.
– Dave
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