Link aggregation to increase bandwidth

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jangoloti wrote:

 

One simple question: Is there a good way of milking a bit more of throughput to my NAS, used by a single user which is me, from my MacMini 2018 with 10GbE port, just by updating one component of my setup?

 

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Does the Mac have a 10GBASE-T port?  Do you know if it's NIC supports MultiGiG? There are several 10 GbE physical layers, so you do need to be careful on that.

You need a managed switch with a 10 gig port.  You set up a static LAG in that switch that uses the two connections to the NAS.  On the NAS side, you select "round robin" as the aggregation method.  This will double the bandwidth from the NAS to the switch.  Bandwidth to the NAS will likely double, but that depends on the packet scheduling mechanism in the switch (which is never clearly stated in the data sheet).  Of course the bandwidth is only one constraint, there might be other bottlenecks (processor limits, etc).

One consequence of allowing flows from the NAS to exceed 1 gigabit is that you will potentially overrun clients that don't have 10 Gig.  But if you connect with WiFi, you likely are already doing that now.  In any event, one option to prevent buffer overun is to enable flow control in the switch (and check to see if it is enabled in the clients).  The other is to depend on TCP retransmission/rate control.

The net here is that the switch you are considering can be used to do what you want (as long as it will connect at 10 gigabits with the Mac).