[kwlug-disc] Fast transfer protocol?

[John Johnson]

At 13:53 2010-10-22, Paul Nijar wrote:
>My purposes are twofold: to determine whether my gigabit network card
>is capable of transfering at anything close to a gigabit ....

I doubt that you will be able to get sustained data transfers 
anywhere near 1 Gigabit/sec within a PC let alone through a network card.
There are many choke points in the way. Someone already mentioned 
that hard disk speeds would be a factor and suggested the use of 
a  RAM disk. Other choke points include the various data transfer 
busses in a PC involved and the bridges between these busses. All of 
these have maximum data transfer speeds as does the RAM and other components.

I did a quick search on "north bridge" as it pertains to PC 
architecture and the best overview I could find was here:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/motherboard.htm/printable

The keyword in by statement above is "sustained". Network cards 
should be able to "bursty IO" at the data rates supported by the card 
as these "bursts" will be handled by the card itself and will be 
passed through the PCI bus to the RAM (assuming that the card is 
using DMA) at speeds limited by the busses involved.

Is anyone from Sandvine here and have anything to add?

Thanks
John Johnson