I am running a small business consists of 4-5 computers with wired LAN connection and a networked printer too , for me network speed is very important so should i change NIC , buy a ultra fast server or change cable etc , is typical question asked from several of my friends so in this article i am trying to summarize analysis which we did in various scenarios in various sizes of LAN.
First we should try to understand essentially we are talking about network speed not the internet speed, which depends broadband connection plan you choose and how much bandwidth your ISP is providing to you , so keeping this in mind lets discuss the factors affecting our LAN speed.
Ethernet Speed :-
First make sure all ethernet adapters in your LAN are at least of 100mbps speed , After changing you can see a noticeable change in the LAN performance , although same incremental performance improvement can not be observed when we shift from 100 mbps to gigabit ethernet see Achieve maximum performance with Gigabit Nic.
Cable quality :-
Till ultra fast 802.11n wireless devices are not reliably gives good performance lets stick to our cabled LAN for high speed data transfer , you should always take into account quality of shielding to CAT cable ,connectors and the connection joint . Typically even a small cable with bad shielding and poor connections can perform as poorly as a long cable , specified maximum length of cable as per specification is 100 mtr , but we should try to squeeze cable length as much possible.
Server Installation :-
With help of network analyzers we should analyze typical usage of our LAN, although beast(network analyzers) is very expensive and can not be afford by a small scale business , still taking it on loan even for a single day for analysis will be enough for us to obtain the usage pattern of our LAN. If the usage pattern is mostly between various machines and most of the users are typically concerned for some sort of particular environment for their job(typical environment of an organization where users are developing application and need compilation environment) so you can install a central server repository and create login for different users ,do keep in mind the configuration of your server it should be high end, initially it may seem a costly investment but over a period of time you will admire this .
Peer to Peer Usage :-
you can either ban P2P usage completely or at least try to set a plausible limit , reason being P2P is fast and if these connections persist in your LAN for long time it may clogged the LAN and other users may feel the annoying heat of slowing network.
Printer :-
Typically printer is a very slow device and making your LAN fast can not change its state if it is slow , but printer works on spooling mechanism , which essentially makes sure if we give print command the data is stored on the hard drive of the system to which printer is connected , so if we change the hard drive to some high speed hard drive like solid state of other high rpm options then we should see some considerable incremental speed gain for printer as well .
system activity and hard drives
if we are transferring data between two computers and simultaneously we are doing some other CPU intensive job on the same system then we may witness slow network speed , but this time bottle neck is our computer not the network . similarly if our network job like copying involves lot of hard drive operations then bottleneck may be hard drive speed rather then LAN .
So friends ! how do you plan to maximize your LAN speed,Please share your comments
