Sharing the ethernet

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Fri, 28 Apr 89 08:47:29 mdt
    From: intvax!drstrip@unmvax.cs.unm.edu

    The ethernet that my symbolics sits on is running peaks of about 30% utilization
    with second or two gaps of only a few percent. Nonetheless, chaos traffic 
    between pairs of symbolics hosts is getting almost no share of the net
    at all. Are there some tuning parameters I need to tweak? And to what
    values?
    David Strip

If your ethernet is at 30% saturation, it's overloaded.  At our site we
start noticing degradation if the network is over 20%.  Periodic 30%
bursts are to be expected, but it shouldn't be continuous.  I suggest
you reorganize your network into multiple subnets.  If you've got
diskless Suns paging across that network, try to separate into a Sun net
and a Lispm net.

If you can't think of a good reason why the net is overloaded, I suggest
you use some kind of ethernet monitoring tool (e.g. Sun etherfind or a
standalone ethernet monitor) and find out what all that traffic is.
There may be a runaway process flooding the net.

                                                barmar