CompuServe Messages

Note that it doesn't make much sense using 100MBps Ethernet (or FDDI) with just a handful of PC's. No PC will pump much more than around 20MBps any way (20 Mega Bits per second = 2.5 Mega Bytes per second not counting the overhead which is greater than 200%). Your LAN bottle neck is the ability of the server to handle multiple requests. There are many different approaches to speed that up (up to 10 times) without resorting to 100MBps ethernet (and its absurd costs). If you need lots of performance, you would be better off consulting a LAN professional and studying the alternatives. There are things out there (like the Kalpana Ether Switch) that will balance network load distribution and achieve throughput of up to 60MBps using standard hardware. The trick is having more than one card on the server and distributing the load among them. Your PC will do just fine with 10MBps provided it receives data at that rate. If you stop and really measure you current performance, you will notice it's bellow 3MBPs.