Do Switches Reduce Performance?
Do Switches Reduce Performance?
At home we use an Apple Airport router and a Netgear GS605 switch. My two Windows laptops are sharing drives over the network. When connected through the switch with Ethernet cables, file transfers were slow at 11MBps. Plugging both directly into the Airport router gave much faster speeds of 111MBps. I’m confused about why this difference happened. Could it be the switch is faulty? Is the cable damaged or improperly connected? Is performance naturally reduced in this setup? I’m not very familiar with networking, so I’m unsure what might be causing this issue. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Switches definitely don't reduce performance and no, this is not normal. That switch is listed as gigabit capable so you should see no difference depending on where you're plugged in unless a cable or something is damaged. For local connectivity (on the same subnet) then it should never even hit the router, the switch would well switch the packets between the two ports on its own.
You need to check the connections between the two devices. A 11MB/s speed suggests 100mbps ports, indicating either an insufficient cable or a port operating at 100mbps for some reason. The link between the Switch and Router isn't important since the Switch will skip the router if the target MAC is in its forwarding list.