A "logical" switch question, if you stack a switch, won't your peformance decrease?

atomicbomberman

Golden Member
Aug 23, 2000
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My friend just recently came up w/ something.. I'm just wondering if you stack the switch togeter, say.. you have 2 5 port 10/100 switch, hook one up to the other's uplink port, then you have 8 port total rite (5 and uplink is shared) And say, you fill all ports, now.. say everyone from switch#1 is tring to grab files from some comptuer on switch #2, that way ALL trffic from switch #1 have to go through the uplink port to get to switch #2, wouldn't it slows down because all the traffic must go though that one single cable/port?

As far as I know from my networking knowledge (I know very little), a switch doens't get effected by it because it'll treat it as a same coullision domain, but each comptuer is still on it's own network domain.. but well.. anyone?

 

Chatterjee

Senior member
Nov 16, 1999
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I always wondered the same thing (i.e. whether 4 chained 4-port switchs functioned just as well as a 16-port switch)

-S
 

LordOfAll

Senior member
Nov 24, 1999
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You are limited to the speed of that one uplink port to the machines on the other side of it. Switches have what is called the backplane, which is responable for transfering the data from port to port. Hooking up multiple switches through the uplink ports isn't the same as being on one consistant backplane.
 

todays

Senior member
May 11, 2000
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Although if it's a 100 base switch and you are sharing a 1.5 mb/sec DLS connection, you would still have plenty of throughoutput. You wouldn't notice. You could notice it if you did regular heavy traffice between machines on a network. But, still probably not with just 8 ports. This is why if you add even more switches to your setup, you should plug them into the first switch always, until all the ports in the first switch all full. Am I babbling or do you get it?
 

Shadow07

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Oct 3, 2000
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Stacking usually refers to connecting multiple switches together with a SCSI cable to the SCSI port on the back of the switch. Also, it means that you have one Master switch that you can manage all switches under it (connected via TCP/IP) from one IP address. When you connect switches together with more than one port, that is called Link Aggregation, when you combine the 2-4 ports together to increase the total bandwidth. Most switches today support this so you can increase performance with Link Aggregation, or Port Trunking.