[gonzo]

“Line rate” is not “fill the link with TCP”. Line rate is “fill the link with 84 octet (including all overhead) frames.”

For 100M Ethernet this requires 148,809 packets per second.

Edit: for 1538 octet frames, one need only process 8,127 packets per second.

[dark-star]

"Line rate" is "fill the 100Mbit link with 100 million bits each second". Of course the overhead is included in that, since the overhead also goes over the wire

[Hikikomori]

Smallest packet line rate is usually the definition network engineers use when discussing performance of devices.

[gbil]

I'm many years away from such topics but I don't remember this being the case, moreover specs for net equipment was (is) on pps with the details stating usually 2-3 packet size categories. I'm interested on some reference on what you wrote

[Hikikomori]

https://www.fmad.io/blog/what-is-10g-line-rate

As the article calls it, the gold standard. If a device is capable of forwarding/switching packets at the smallest packet size line rate on all interfaces at the same time you don't have to think too much about its performance when designing your network. Haven't worked much with hardware for a few years but it was common that Cisco switches were not capable of this.

[Dylan16807]

Gold standard sure, but that doesn't make it the definition of line rate.

[nsteel]

Vendors I've seen usually use one of a few "standard" packet size mixes e.g. imix. Nobody uses smallest size frames because nobody can hit their headline perf numbers for that, and it's not representative of real-world usage anyway.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mix

[Hikikomori]

I think this applies more to firewalls used for simple internet connections than switches/routers.

[nsteel]

I was specifically talking about enterprise/core routers where the packet processing can be non-trivial and small frames hurt performance.

[gonzo]

This is a lazy definition and won’t get you past “Go” when making network equipment. Why not use 9000 byte “Jumbo” frames? You’ll only need to process 1,383 packets per second to fill the link!

[guenthert]

That's actually what NAS vendors do.

[gonzo]

RPi Pico NAS at nearly 600Mbps!

What could go wrong?