Interesting question on bandwidth

[news2010a]

CIO sends 10KB of data from his workstation A to workstation B. Both users are connected to a 100MB/s switch port. Then user CIO complains that he thinks his experience transferring files is too slow. He requests a gigbit port connection for everyone in the office (including workstation B) and you perform that change.

Which answer below is correct?

a)Users will not notice any difference transferring the same 10KB file.

b)Users will notice faster experience when transferring that 10KB file.

[dgahm]

Do the math: 80,000/100,000,000= .0008 seconds, or .8 milliseconds at 100mb/s.

Sending the file at 1gb/s will take .08 milliseconds.

You are going to need a much larger file before anyone would notice the difference. My math here is a bit of an oversimplification, there is overhead in network protocols, but the conclusion is valid. Workstation performance is going to be a bigger factor in transferring small files at LAN speeds than the difference between 100 and 1000mb network speed.

Dave

[news2010a]

Interesting. A senior network manager during a job interview argued that it would make no difference because the link is not max out wiht such 10KB small file, therefore you do not see the benefit. I was puzzled and confused by his statement, but that's what he asserted and I obviously did not want to admonish him at that time. I just want to double check to see whether I was overlooking something :-)