Unmanaged switch and distributed rendering

[tricky]

After the lovely long Diamond Jubilee weekend, we returned to our office to find our 3Com managed switch (24 port) had died. We needed a quick 'stop-gap' replacement so I managed to find a local reseller who had a 24port unmanaged switch in stock for a few quid. It has 24x auto-sensing 10/100 ports and 2x gigabit ports.

The 3com model we had was quite an advanced unit that I believe cost in the region of £1000-1500 a few years ago. Although it was managed, we never actually 'logged-in' to make any changes to the config - I think it just self managed itself and seemed to work quite well.

The stop-gap unmanaged is from an unknown manufacturer (to us at any rate), and I wondered how I might test how well it is working for us? If I am sending a DR job to 3 or 4 render nodes for example, with other general network activity going on at the same time, how can I assess how much of a slowdown the unmanaged switch might be causing us?

Any suggestions?

[suurland]

No idea how to test that, I would just use it in production and see if it works out. But if you are concerned with speed I don't quite understand why you got one with only two gigabit ports.

[tricky]

No idea how to test that, I would just use it in production and see if it works out. But if you are concerned with speed I don't quite understand why you got one with only two gigabit ports.

Only one to be had in our locality. I'm suprised I found even this one!

[Morne]

the 2 gigabit ports is probably to connect to your backbone. The main ports are where your pc's will go. If this is the only switch in your company, then you dont have to worry about the backbone, as the switch pretty much is the backbone then.
That being said, with other traffic going on, and the "normal ports" only being 100 and not gigabit, I'd say you're probably getting a fair amount of slowdown during dr file transfers etc even more so if there is also other traffic. You get various tools to check these things, but likely that you don't have it readily available. Only option then is to use "task manager" and go to the right onto the "networking tab". Here you should see a graph of your usage and at the bottom it should tell you a percentage.

If you want something more advanced, (I forget the shortcut for it now) but you can navigate to it by right-clicking on "my computer" then "properties", then bottom left (on vista - not at work now so can't check win7 but should be same place) bottom left "performance" then on left "advanced tools" and then "open reliability and performance monitor". Then "network": Here you see more detail about what is going on.

Hope that helps

By the way, when you get a moment, could you please give some comments about the pm I sent you a week or 2 ago...

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I cant remember name but there are simple network test programs that let u send xx fake file to other computer. U can send it to 5 gb on each pc start sending and see how ur network behave... gl

Id say get 24 gb/10gb/100gb switch and let us know how it works - I think for close local networks its more than enough

[plastic_]

100mbit is really slooow, I know because one of my boxes sometimes falls back to 100mbit, some driver issue.
Makes file copy operations crawl, compareable to internet downloads. While with gigabit I get about 50mb/s, which is quite nice.
I didn't know 100mb switches are still sold, seems like last century to me.

[tricky]

100mbit is really slooow, I know because one of my boxes sometimes falls back to 100mbit, some driver issue.
Makes file copy operations crawl, compareable to internet downloads. While with gigabit I get about 50mb/s, which is quite nice.
I didn't know 100mb switches are still sold, seems like last century to me.

Believe me - the shop is very last century.