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Specifically in your case, a bursty 100 Mbps traffic to port Fa0/1 can, via the means of flow control, effectively turn your uplink to 100 Mbps link. That's all fine, but what if Fa 0/2 now wants to get some data from something upstream?
But if you can’t, then you need to get yourself a "smart" gigabit switch that has Flow Control enable/disable. You can’t do this by changing to a different unmanaged gigabit switch, since all of them support 802.3x flow control, which can’t be disabled.
What is flow control? Flow control is a mechanism used to help manage the rate of data transfer between two devices. This is done to help prevent a source evice from overwhelming a destination device by sending more packets than the destination can handle.
Flow control enables connected Ethernet ports to control traffic rates during congestion by allowing congested nodes to pause link operation at the other end. If one port experiences congestion and cannot receive any more traffic, it notifies the other port by sending a pause frame to stop sending until the condition clears.
Flow Control is used by a switch or client/server to prevent uncontrolled packet drops. When the switch or server PREDICTS that based on the current traffic flow, it will run out of buffers in the next few packets, it will fire a PAUSE frame (request) at the sending device.
Windows now seems to enable it on both RX/TX by default but I am not sure if we should be disabling that. Does anyone know anything on the pros and cons of flow control? Share
I would recommend against using "standard" Ethernet flow control, unless you have a really good reason for using it, and you understand all its implications. If your issue is interface drops, you're probably better managing congestion with QoS and/or buffer tuning.
I have read that Flow Control helps to prevent buffer issues on the receiving device by using a pause frame. However I do not know if this is a recommended best practice for Switch to Server connections or Switch to Switch connections.
Flow Control is a feature usually used in the business grade devices: "With this option enabled, when a device gets overloaded it will send a PAUSE frame to notify the peer device to stop sending data for a specified period of time, thus avoiding the packet loss caused by congestion.
Flow Control (MAC Pause) is enabled during Auto-Negotiation with 2 bits in one of the exchanged pages. It has effect only if duplex is enabled. It's also handled at the MAC layer and can be handled in hardware.