Jumbo Frames and Flow Control

Summary

Jumbo Frames provide a way of reducing the amount of frames and processing required by hardware and applices on a netowrk with fewer frames being sent/received.

Downsides

To be able to support Jumbo Frames all systems must support the same MTUs (Meximum Transmission Units)-the standard is 1,500 bytes, the jumbo frame supports 9,000 bytes. The types of hardware and appliances that are required to support Jumbo Frames are more expensive, and it requires all other hardware and appliances on the network to also support them.

Flow Control

Flow control provides a way to tell a sender to slow down traffic until the processor can catch up on processing packets on a system-this is done by using something called “PAUSE” frames