Enabling jumbo packets

[huotg01]

I know what is a jumbo packet. It's an IP packet with more "payload" in the packet, a packet bigger than the standard I understand that it could be helpfull when handling big files. I also understand that, with some applications like VOIP, it could be not so good. That's minimal but it's all I know.

What are the effects (good and bad) of enabling that functionality on Merlin's built ? Is it worth full ?

Thanks,

GH

 

[RMerlin]

Back in the day, Jumbo Frame made sense for various reasons. It could greatly reduce the burden on a router's CPU by having fewer checksums to calculate (since packets were larger), in addition to a bit of extra performance. These days the CPU matter is pretty moot in the case of a home network.

The problem is, for Jumbo Frames to work properly, everything on your LAN must be using it, and also use the same packet size. If one device uses 7K and the other 8K, you will experience performance issues.

I experimented with them a bit last year, and ended up deciding they weren't worth the trouble. They could lead to hard-to-troubleshoot issues down the road if I were to someday connect a network device that didn't handle these properly. Just to get a SMB transfer go from 70 MB/s to 75 MB/s, it wasn't worth the risk IMHO.