Should I disable flow control? Mixed network.

[dany2010]

Hi.

 

One of my schools has three switches. All covering different parts of the school.

 

Two are gigabyte switches and the other is 100mb.

 

The two GB switches have the ability to disable flow control on individual ports. The 100 switch doesn't have this function.

 

The servers go into one of the 1000 switches. The workstations are then mixed between 100 and 1000 speeds.

 

Should I disable flow control on any of the ports?

 

Many thanks

[CyberNerd]

Would you benefit from disabling it? My understanding is that flow control is designed to stop the receiver port from being flooded with data.

 

I would reduce the speed of the 1GbE clients to 100Mb/s to give all clients fair and equal access to the servers and prevent certain users bottlenecking the servers - at least until you can provide everyone with the same bandwidth. Many here disagree with my rational here, but I stick to it.