What are the typical performance-limiting issues with Gigabit Ethernet and when using protocol stacks like TCP/IP?
A. In Gigabit Ethernet as well as other gigabit-speed transmission technologies, performance bottlenecks can occur due to hardware and software components that are “out of balance” with each other. In addition, performance bottlenecks are commonly found in “shared resources” used in the path of the communications channel. These are categorized as hardware issues (CPU, memory and bus bandwidth). Other overhead and performance limitations exist in the operating system, task switching, Socket API and the TCP/IP protocol stack itself. In Gigabit Ethernet, the primary limiting factors are not the physical wire, gigabit controller or device driver because these components employ dedicated hardware and high-speed intelligent burst DMA technology. In addition, the device driver is not directly involved in byte-level data transfer — its overhead is based on frame rates. The driver acts only as a buffer manager and dispatcher operating on entire linked lists of buffers and sending DMA instructi
