Throughput and buffer memory information

[wtm]

This one is probably for Steven:

As we are building out our network from heavy throughput sites down to smaller relay sites, can you give us a rough idea on what each switch will do for throughput going through it, and what it might have for "Flow Control" buffering.

Reasoning behind it, is to figure which version switch that we should be using at each site. Say at our smaller relay sites that we might want to put in a mini 6, but if we knew that the mini 6 would only process so much, that we should instead put in a larger WS8 or WS12 there.

This would tremendously help us in not installing something too small, and wondering why we can't process all that required bandwidth that is now needed.

I am not talking about POE needs here, just data throughput and buffering capabilities for the different models.

(I am hoping along the line you have done some tests and can provide that to us ?) Thank you !

[Stephen]

Hey wtm,

Well, I have not really had any trouble pushing 1G ingress/egress on any ports on the switches. I don't have an adequate lab setup to push that much data through all ports at once, but I've hit that throughput pretty easily for about 4 ports when I was running some QoS tests awhile back.

Now I have not done this with Flow Control enabled though, frankly, we almost always recommend people disable it because it tends to cause trouble on wireless links that have a nearly variable throughput medium that tends to respond directly to the environment.

Another note though, the switches are hardware switched so the performance should always be line speed and to my knowledge I haven't seen it drop from this except when something is wrong in the configuration/firmware issue/other network device causing interference, but most of my tests generally last only a few hours, there may be some other users who have longer up times who might be able to tell you their results on a larger network that might be helpful. I know that sirhc has his own WISP that he runs on our switches that have a few years uptime. However, I don't believe he has had to worry about consistent throughput's too far above 500MB on them except for an occasional spike to 1G and to the best of my knowledge they handle it fine.

One more note, all of our switch model's (with the exception of the new WS3) use the exact same switch core, including the WS-6-MINI, meaning that throughput performance in terms of frame switching should be the same across the board. The main design consideration for a network with the different models is port, power/PoE performance, etc,

For example, the WS-12-250-AC, has 12 ports, and a 250 Watt AC power supply.
Whereas, the WS-26-500-DC has 26 ports, a 500 watt DC (from a battery, etc) power supply
and they will all perform at 1G.

I hope that helps.