uplinking switches degrades performance for lan games?

[Kraeji]

I am setting up a lan party of about 18 clients to play counter strike. Currently I have two 4 port linkysys routers. I was thinking of maybe buying a 12 port switch and uplinking the two routers to the switch.. or vice versa.. what do you think guys? Will that degrade performance vs using one huge 24 port switch? Should I go with this setup? Any ideas on the configuration i should use.. what switch uplinks to what router.. etc.. I appreciate any help

 

[Santa]

"Uplink" is more of a term better used in a business enviroment where you are providing more bandwidth for the uplink ports such as Fast Ethernet (100Mbits) or Gigabit (1000Mbits)

Usually in a home setting to uplink or the uplink port is nothing more than a pre-crossed port where you can use a standard straight through cable to connect it and a another device.

In your situation it should not matter whether you use the uplink or not it is more or less just another port availble to you to use. Make sure you do not go from uplink to uplink port though.

Typical setup is to go from uplink port to standard port so say you have an uplink port on your Switch you would connect to the router using a straight through cable to a normal port on the router. Not the uplink port on the router. Or vice a versa you could use the uplink port on the router to connect to the normal port on the switch but typically you would do the router to the switch's uplink port.

 

[gaidin123]

I don't think you'll have any noticeable performance differences as far as gameplay goes if you uplink the 2 Linksys routers to a 12 or 16 port switch. If you use a 100Mbit port on each of the Linksys routers to uplink via a crossover cable then you will have even less of a performance drop since the WAN port on those routers is only 10Mbit. that means that you'd get 3 ports for each router. 12 port switches are kind of uncommon and 16 port ones are realllly common so that's probably what you'll end up with.

I recently bought the Netgear 16 port one on a deal from buy.com (a few months ago) and it's great...Low profile and no internal fan. The Linksys one also doesn't have a fan but the Netgear specs are higher for backbone bandwidth and a few other things (per port cache I believe). SMC and DLink ones had fans as I recall (my old 16 port switch's fan started getting more and more noticeable and my room was too noisy in general).

Gaidin

 

[Kraeji]

Thanks for the info.. i know how uplink works.. i just need to know if i should go with a regular 24 port switch or go with a few smaller switches uplinked to each other.. will the performance degrade like that?

 

[spidey07]

You shouldn't notice a performance hit. there is one but you'd be hard pressed to measure it (i don't feel like doing the math on switch latency)

But do keep in mind you'll be limited by that single link connecting the switches so if 5 people decide to download huge files off a server or two on the other switch you'll start filling the link.

 

[CubicZirconia]

I've been to lans where someone just brings a super huge 24 port switch and to others where we have a series of switches for everyone. I can tell you that you won't see any lag increase with either option.

 

[Santa]

As Spidey mentioned think about your choke points..

Your Performance should be fine but obviously getting a 24 port and not sharing any uplink port (cept for the link to the server) would be beneficial but 5 clients over full duplex 100Mbit shouldn't be a problem at all.

What you want to make sure you do, which I think you know, is to string the routers to their own port on the switch instead of daisy chaining them one after another.

Switch 12 - 2(uplink) + Router 5 - 1(uplink) + 5 - 1(uplink) which should give you 18 exactly.