Do Switches Reduce Performance?

[JohnSmith2]

At home, we have an Apple Airport router and a Netgear GS605 switch. I have two Windows laptops set to share drives over the network. I plugged both laptops into the switch using ethernet cables and transferred a 10GB file between the two. I was getting 11MBps (megabytes per second). When I plugged both directly into the Airport router instead (using the same ethernet cables for each laptop), the same file transferred ten times faster (111 MBps). I do not understand this speed difference at all. I expected the performance to be the same. What could cause this disparity? Is it:

• The switch is bad?
• The ethernet cable connecting the switch to the router is bad (I don't even know if this is relevant)?
• This is normal and all switches reduce performance like this?

I know very little about computer networking, so I have no idea why the performance was so bad. Any ideas?

[Lurick]

Switches definitely don't reduce performance and no, this is not normal. That switch is listed as gigabit capable so you should see no difference depending on where you're plugged in unless a cable or something is damaged. For local connectivity (on the same subnet) then it should never even hit the router, the switch would well switch the packets between the two ports on its own.

[Kilrah]

Well it won't reduce performance if it matches the capabilities of the connected devices, but of course if your devices are gigabit but the switch is an old 100Mbps one it sure will, and about to what you're seeing.

 

So it just seems you have an old 100Mbps switch instead of a gigabit one.

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

Well it won't reduce performance if it matches the capabilities of the connected devices, but of course if your devices are gigabit but the switch is an old 100Mbps one it sure will, and about to what you're seeing.

 

So it just seems you have an old 100Mbps switch instead of a gigabit one.

The GS605 is listed as gigabit

https://www.netgear.com/support/product/GS605.aspx

[svmlegacy]

19 minutes ago, JohnSmith2 said:

At home, we have an Apple Airport router and a Netgear GS605 switch. I have two Windows laptops set to share drives over the network. I plugged both laptops into the switch using ethernet cables and transferred a 10GB file between the two. I was getting 11MBps (megabytes per second). When I plugged both directly into the Airport router instead (using the same ethernet cables for each laptop), the same file transferred ten times faster (111 MBps). I do not understand this speed difference at all. I expected the performance to be the same. What could cause this disparity? Is it:

• The switch is bad?
• The ethernet cable connecting the switch to the router is bad (I don't even know if this is relevant)?
• This is normal and all switches reduce performance like this?

I know very little about computer networking, so I have no idea why the performance was so bad. Any ideas?

Check the cables running between the switch and router. If possible, check the speed. It sounds like you have a low speed connection between the router and switch, or laptop and switch.

[Windows7ge]

You're going to want to inspect the cables between the two computers. 11MB/s is indicative of 100mbps interfaces which means you either have a cable not capable of Gigabit or an interface running at 100mbps for one reason or another.

 

The cable between the Switch and the Router should not be relevant here as communication between two local clients the Switch will bypass the router if the destination MAC address is in it's Forwarding Table.