said by TomS_:For example. If youre doing a lot of bandwidth intensive work, say video production, sure you want throughput to move stuff around quickly, but youre probably going to need a switch with deep buffers to handle the large amounts of data being pumped in to the network.
Likewise, in a datacentre where traffic is likely to be more intense, deep buffered switches will likely be necessary to minimise packet drops etc.
correct -- but just as important as buffering, is how the switch is actually forwarding traffic.
i don't need deep queues if i'm dealing with switches that perform cut-through switching (a la cisco nexus line). i keep my buffers small at the edge and only queue/buffer when i need to move to store-and-forward (usually when i'm performing classification and queueing at my distro layer). knowing how a switch behaves, and more importantly, when traffic flows will prompt a given forwarding behaviour -- is just as important as knowing queue depth and oversubscription.
q.