[j-nsp] ex4500 best-effort drops nowhere near congested

[ryanL]

thx jeff. yeah, all these ports are actually already in ae bundles.
and i've disabled flow-control on all of 'em. seems like the best i
can do, i guess.

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 7:44 AM, Jeff Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz> wrote:
> On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 4:01 PM, ryanL <ryan.landry at gmail.com> wrote:
>> good discussion. the tl;dr - nothing i can do about it. right?
>
> You can add LACP/ECMP ports/paths to reduce the chance that packets
> need to be buffered so long that the buffer becomes full.
>
> To use a dirty word, flow-control might be an option as well.
> However, you need to carefully test the particular switch and software
> to see if it works with any sanity.  Also remember that flow-control
> is likely to effectively cause HoL blocking on a port transmitting a
> lot of traffic toward another port that is busy, and other ports which
> aren't.  For example, you would not want to send flow-control to a
> 10GE storage server's port that is transmitting to any 1GE ports
> because it would likely be harmful to storage performance for all
> connected hosts, whenever just one host's port is full.  I personally
> think that the complexity, buggyness, and potential gotchas of
> flow-control far out-weigh the small potential gains.
>
> --
> Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
> Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts