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Richard Brown wrote:
If you're referring to a standard broadband router then I wouldn't have thought so.Hi All Can switches be responsible for network bottlenecks please? I understood that some switches can handle only a certain amount of transfer. So if I have 15 computers all using the network at the same time I am concerned that that could cause a bottleneck in the router.
How many switches do you have?At home I have about 5 switches in my network, mainly routers acting as switches, and one 24-port 100Mbit switch in the loft attached to my server (which eventually will be all taken out and replaced with a Gigabit switch with CAT5 cable runs to each room.
Now I have about 3 machines which connect to my server from my lounge. They're all connected to one switch which is running at 100Mbit. So I can connect from my laptop (which is wired) to one of my desktops over this switch at 100Mbit (or there abouts). I can also connect to my server at 100Mbits. But if for instance I'm doing two things such as copying some stuff from my server on one machine, and also copying something on another machine to the kids PC upstairs for instance, the PCs downstairs all go through this 100Mbit switch so they are sharing the bandwidth.
If on the other hand I have a Gigabit switch, and each machine had a 100Mbit card and the server had a 1GBit card then each machine in theory should be able to connect to the server at the full 100Mbit.
This is what we did with the LTSP project in Exwick. The server has a 1Gbit port connected to a 1Gbit switch, each client (6 in total) connect to the server at 100Mbit, so each machine should get a full 100Mbit to the server.
But if your problem is a slow internet connection speed over 15 machines then I'd say it is unlikely to be the switch, especially considering most broadband connections are up to about 24 Meg so the switch will run faster than the broadband connection. I'd say maybe it is more the broadband connection which is limiting the speed so if this is a problem then maybe it would be worth looking at maybe bonding a couple of connections (I believe Enta can do this) or have two separate connections from two different ISPs and have half the machines use one connection and the other half use the other (or get a load balancing router to automatically balance the load across the two connections).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html