Is Network Interface Card a Bottleneck?

An application might have performance issues because of bottleneck present in network.  Network bottleneck results usually because of following reasons –
  1. Network Bandwidth
  2. Network Interface Capacity
Network Bandwidth
Network bandwidth is usually discussed in terms of organization’s network bandwidth as well as bandwidth available to public from ISP / network of ISPs.  Network bandwidth is dependent on multiple factors like routers speed, physical network media, firewall etc.  I will not be discussing in this article on how to identify bottlenecks presents in the network.  There are many tools like ping, netstat, traceroute etc. that can be used for identifying problems present in network itself.

Following are the list of issues that can be resulted due to inefficient network –
a.       Loss of packets
b.      Delay in the transmission of the packets (Jitter)
c.       Resulting of high latency due to long round trips
d.      Low bandwidth availability on physical network media (optical / copper etc.)

Network Interface Capacity
Detection of network interface card (NIC) bottleneck can be identified by charting following performance counters –

  1. Network Interface (Instance): Current Bandwidth
  2. Network Interface (Instance):  Bytes Total / sec
Compare amount of bytes transferred in/out over NIC with total bandwidth of network adapter.  If bytes being transferred are using more than 40% of available capacity then it is highly possible that NIC card is the bottleneck and replacing it might solve the performance issues.


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