Jumbo Frames?

[Cyber-Mav]

i see this option is always off on network card settings in device manager. are there issues if its turned on and other devices on the network dont support jumbo frames?

 

[Robert T.]

Hi,
This is most commonly used in server and datacenters, for normal user it is better to leave it on default..

And yes, once you'll enable it on one device and other end does not support it - you'll create headache for yourself.

Basically - jumbo frame is a data packet with more than normal amount of data in it. If other device see it - it will either discard it as malformed, or it will divide it into smaller packets and generate new traffic that will be small enough for it to process. But in proces of generating new packets - you will lose time and effort that requires to handle division of packet into smaller chunks and also on other end you will also have to combine those new packets into original one and process it only after that is done.

But - if you have devices capable on either end to handle it and both will get configured same way - in home environment you don't have any real benefit, but will also not run into any problems.
Both ends just need matching config.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

Done some tests on 2 computers on 1 gigabit lan. Without jumbo large video file transfer sustained 113 megabytes per second. With jumbo on it was sustained 116 megabytes per second.
So yes does give more efficiency.
Also if only one computer has jumbo on and the other doesn't they can both communicate with each other fine.

I wonder if 10G Lan speed can be maxed out without jumbo frames?

 

[TechMinerUK]

Done some tests on 2 computers on 1 gigabit lan. Without jumbo large video file transfer sustained 113 megabytes per second. With jumbo on it was sustained 116 megabytes per second.
So yes does give more efficiency.
Also if only one computer has jumbo on and the other doesn't they can both communicate with each other fine.

I wonder if 10G Lan speed can be maxed out without jumbo frames?

I think generally jumbo frames is more commonly used with 10G networks in order to reduce the number of packets sent when transferring data. I'm currently rolling out 10G at home across my servers and I have it enabled for the iSCSI networks but not for the "Standard data" networks

 

[ChrisD.]

There really isn’t much benefit in the majority of home environments.

 

[Nemiyen]

Agree with what's already been said. Jumbo frames are when you want, or need, to eek out as much performance as possible. It's usually used in iSCSI with SAN implementations as they have a lot of consistent network traffic that can be optimised with larger aka jumbo frames.

It works great when you're in control of everything as, already mentioned, all devices need to be configured to use it or it can cause issues. Also, if the network setup is poor then jumbo frames can actually make things worse as you're wasting 6x longer time to resend a packet if it's corrupted at the end.

 

[Caged]

If you're not running at 10Gb then it's pointless, and even then you might not notice any improvement. Your switches need to support it, as well as the client and server.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

I have two rigs at home with 10g ethernet connections (connected via a 10g/2.5gb switch). And I have not enabled Jumbo Frames, but when transferring across large files across the two (loaded onto Ramdrives) I get full speeds. So as others have said, unlikely to be really needed at the home environment.