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The two most common performance metrics are a switch's fabric bandwidth and its PPS rate.
A "high performance" switch generally supports wire-speed for all ports, concurrently. Fabric bandwidth would be 2x all your port bandwidths. PPS (for Ethernet) would be 1.488 Mpps per gig port.
For example, the original 4948 (48 x gig) is described as having a 96 Gbps fabric and 72 Mpps.
The original 3750G-48 (52 x gig) is described as having a 32 Gbps fabric and 38.7 Mpps.
The 4948 has the capacity to run all ports at wire-speed. The 3750G-48 does not. Yet, rarely do we really need switches with capacity to run every port at wire-speed, concurrently. Further, just having wire-speed bandwidth and pps capacity does not guarantee optimal performance in all real-world situations. Other features are just as or more important too, such as buffering capacity, non-blocking architecture, QoS, TCAM capacity, etc.
