What type of system, speed and features are recommended for Gigabit Ethernet?
A. We provide the following information to assist in determining system requirements for supporting Gigabit Ethernet: Gigabit Ethernet is fast technology — the PCI bus, memory and CPU performance should be balanced to accommodate the performance required. Connection oriented protocol stacks and API’s (primarily the socket API itself) and TCP/IP may have a high overhead factor when processing data at gigabit speeds. TCP performs better using larger window and message sizes — windows of 16KB – 64KB are sometimes necessary to reduce latency issues. The current TCP implementation also has an issue in that it has characteristic poor performance in networks with a large bandwidth-delay product (long distances at high-rates). Transmitting short messages may also impact performance, however with UDP performs very well with short frame lengths. These are important factors to be considered when using protocol stacks with high-speed Gigabit Ethernet. Alternatives to TCP such as High-speed TCP,
