Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 15:20:42 -0400 From: Laurence Berland <stuyman@confusion.net> To: sthaug@nethelp.no Cc: mike@mikesweb.com, wizard@sybaweb.co.za, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NIC settings Message-ID: <39BBDF09.DD4FF386@confusion.net> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20000910150718.00b3b530@mail.mikesweb.com> <15368.968613173@verdi.nethelp.no>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I'd say you should really be looking at latency across the network, in terms of things like ping, etc. A high number of collisions may be a sign that the latency has gone up, as a result of too many hosts on the same network, in which case some sort of segmentation (ie with switches) can be useful. Collisions alone, however, aren't much of anything of note...unless every person has their own full-duplex port on a switch you will never be able to get rid of them, nor should you want to. Laurence sthaug@nethelp.no wrote: > > > Actually, switching to half duplex won't really help you a whole lot.. I > > had a 10mb hub that had the collision light almost always on. If you want > > to stop the collisions you'll want to replace your hub with a switch. > > Why on earth do you want to stop the collisions? Collisions are *normal* > and *expected* when you use half duplex Ethernet. Collisions seldom matter, > performance does. As Rich Seifert puts it, > > > A major preoccupation with network administrators these days seems to be > > monitoring and worrying about the number of collisions seen on Ethernet > > networks. There is a great deal of folklore and voodoo concerning what > > is an "acceptable" collision rate or collision percentage, and when is > > the network "broken" or on the verge of collapse. Except in the most > > extreme of circumstances (all of which are observable through other, > > better metrics), the number of collisions seen on a network in an > > uninteresting and misleading statistic. > > (If you don't know who Rich Seifert is, check out comp.dcom.lans.ethernet.) > > Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?39BBDF09.DD4FF386>