will gig nic increase thruput in switched lan

[ja1064]

i thought i read somewhere that when you go to a switched infrastructure that putting a gig card in the file server will increase performance on the network. I think the logic was that with all the computers talking at 100 on their own segment, the server can be a bottleneck. However, i'm wondering if that is technically accurate. Do i understand correctly that even with a switch, only one node is communicating with a server at one time? If so, wouldn't the 'rate determining step' be the workstation?

[skarundi]

Putting a gig NIC card is a server would not necessarily improve the server and/or network performance.

Folks often forget that performance affecting variables include client and server processing speed, PCI bus size and the disk read/write speed.

Before purchasing a gig NIC card make sure the rest of the server is optimized to handle that level of traffic.

There was a person who wrote a document about this very issue a couple of years ago on cablingbusiness.com and now the article is not there. The document was called "Overcoming Server Bottlenecks in Gigabit Ethernet Networks". It's a great doc if you can find it.

[ja1064]

so it is accurate to say that a switch port only 'talks'to one other port at a time? there is no 'multitasking'?

but would it also be accurate to assert that if the server can process a request faster, via a gig nic, that it would more quickly be available for the next 'conversation' ?

[skarundi]

No that is not true. Multitasking file server connections is something that the server OS does and is not dependent on the type of NIC.

Also IP uses best effort delivery. That is a port transmits data and hopes that the data will get to the destination. So multiple file server clients can request a file and if the requests all get the file server, the file server should honor all of the requests. How the file server honors the request depends on the file service software/hardware not on the NIC card or IP network.