Does LAN speed distributes among connected terminals on load

[Manavendra Nath Manav]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Alexandru Juncu <alex.juncu at rosedu.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Manavendra Nath Manav
> <mnm.kernel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I have a 100Mbps LAN with 10 connected terminals through a Switch.
>> Now, I understand 100Mbps is the max speed at which a terminal can
>> send/receive data. If every terminal sends data at this speed, then
>> does this speed distributes/divides according to load, or is it
>> dedicated for each terminal. How to measure it?
>>
>> --
>> Manavendra Nath Manav
>
> It's rather a generic question... let me try to begin to answer it.
> First of all, the speed of the link is 100mbps wire speed. There is a
> lot of overhead caused by different protocols (I redirect you to learn
> about the OSI or TCP/IP stacks and about encapsulations). So the speed
> is way lower than 100 when doing anything over the network.
>
> Now, the question about if the speed is shared is hard to answer. The
> straight forward answer is no. Traffic would be shared if the network
> would be connected via a hub ( I doubt hubs are actually used in
> modern networks). Switches are 'smart' so they don't push traffic in
> parts of the network where is not needed, so, theoretically, the
> bandwidth is not share.
>
> However, most of the traffic we have in a network is not inside our
> Local Area Network, but with the Internet and all that traffic passes
> through the gateway. So the gateway would be the bottleneck and the
> traffic is 'distributed' among the hosts in the network.
>
> This is a very brief answer to what you said... maybe if you could
> provide some further details on what exactly you want to do, you will
> receive a better answer.
>
>
> --
> Alexandru Juncu
>
> ROSEdu
> http://rosedu.org

Hi Alexandru,

Thanks for the detailed answer. In my 100Mbps LAN setup, I have
several clients/terminals connected to a server. The problem is that
the server is connected to the LAN via a GPRS module whose bandwidth
is very less (128kbps). So, different clients are parallely sending
data to server but most are getting timed-out because of bandwidth
constraints. My question is how I can verify that packets are being
dropped/timed-out because of bandwidth at the GPRS interface? Is there
any tool to do this?

--
Manavendra Nath Manav