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dwd
join:2008-12-16
Eureka, CA

1 edit

dwd

Member

Realtek NIC and Teaming Question

I have a MB that has two Realtek NIC (1GB) and software that allows you to team the two chips together using a router or switch.

I have a router so I used that. It works, showing 2GB throughput. The reason I did this is because people are saying that it offers redundancy and thus you're less likely to slow down when downloading, playing games, etc.

In essence, if you're ISP gives you a maximum bandwidth downstream of 8000Mb/s and you normally can get only anywhere between 3-6000Mb/s, but teaming your cards you could closer to your maximum.

IS this true? If so I don't understand how that can be because everything is above the stack, and if a slowdown occurs while downloading a file, then it is a bottleneck above the stack.

So I assume, just using some simple logic that the only way this can be true is if it is like two different computers downloading the same file, and both are only getting 4000Mb/s. Thus, if both are getting that bandwidth, you could theoretically double the D/L speed because each connection would be downloading half the file.

That means that your ISP would have to be clean all the way through to its client, and the congestion would have to be above the ISP stack before you could see any benefit.

So can someone explain if I have the idea, or am I totally missing something?

realtek123
@144.191.148.x

realtek123

Anon

Technically it provides some redudancy should one of the interfaces or cables fail that are in the team, as for throughput that depends on the scenario.

2 Computers talking to each other over a pair of teamed nics are not likely to see any benifit from it. Hashing algorithams are used to decide which link to send the stream over and it is largely based on the MAC address of the sender and reciever. A single stream will never exceed the capacity of one single link as the stream is never broken up.

Where you see the benefits of teaming is in large user environements, where hundreds of users would be connecting to a single server. So naturally the hashing would distribute the streams over different interfaces in the team. But even in this scenario it is usually not load balanced, the links can still become quite imbalanced depending on which user is moving what data.

Hope this helps!
dwd
join:2008-12-16
Eureka, CA

dwd

Member

That's what I thought too. Thanks.