Networks

Whenever I see the phrases "autonegotiation" and "poor network performance" together, I usually assume they are related and the first thing I do is hard-code full-speed, full-duplex on all non-workstation interfaces.

That having been said, a "jabbering" NIC could cause this sort of problem but there are a bunch of other possible causes as well and the only way to really know what is going on is to capture a stream of packets and analyze it.

In one system I recently analyzed, the problemwas simply insufficient RAM on the core switch. Because there was not enough RAM to create buffers for all the inbound packets, about 25% were getting dropped and re-sent which started a vicious cycle of increasing traffic. A re-boot was a temporary fix until the buffers filled up again. But we found it first by analyzing a packet capture and seeing lots of re-sends.

paul

This question was closed by the author