Jumbo frames on Naim streamers

Posted by: FDesvaux on 03 January 2017

Hi all,

I've been looking for info on Jumbo frames with Naim streamers, but only found very partial hardly related info, so I thought I'd rather ask the question directly:

Are Naim streamers supporting Ethernet jumbo frames in any manner ? is it recommended ? Both my switch and NAS are supporting this feature and can be configured up to 9000 MTU. I could not find anything in Naim documentation regarding this. As Hi-res files are becoming more and more heavy in size, would it help to increase the frame size ?

FYI my current streamer is an ND5xs

Thanks in advance for any light on this!

 

Posted on: 03 January 2017 by ChrisSU

Naim streamers do not use Gigabit Ethernet, which I believe is required for jumbo frames, so I think the short answer to your question is 'no.'

Posted on: 03 January 2017 by Peter Dinh

I personally do not see any advantages of supporting jumpo frames for music.

Posted on: 03 January 2017 by FDesvaux

Thanks for your answers so far. I had 2 things in mind with this question :

- is it likely to help for music (essentially having in mind the increasing size of Hi-Res files)

- I need it for other purposes on my network (backup of big volume of data between 2 NAS), so if I set it up on the 2 NAS and on the switch, is it likely to harm on the streamer side ?

Thanks for your help, much appreciated 

Posted on: 03 January 2017 by Simon-in-Suffolk
ChrisSU posted:

Naim streamers do not use Gigabit Ethernet, which I believe is required for jumbo frames, so I think the short answer to your question is 'no.'

Chris, no jumbo frames - that is frames greater than the 1500 MTU are not limited to any specific speed, however the network hardware must support these larger MTU sizes or the frames will be dropped. More gigabit interface hardware is able to potentially support jumbo frames than fast ethernet apparently. Some switches, like the Cisco 2960, need to be programmed to accept larger MTU sizes.

I don't believe Naim support jumbo frames - but support the IEEE 802.3 ethernet standard of maximum 1500 MTU.

S

Posted on: 03 January 2017 by Simon-in-Suffolk
FDesvaux posted:

Thanks for your answers so far. I had 2 things in mind with this question :

- is it likely to help for music (essentially having in mind the increasing size of Hi-Res files)

- I need it for other purposes on my network (backup of big volume of data between 2 NAS), so if I set it up on the 2 NAS and on the switch, is it likely to harm on the streamer side ?

Thanks for your help, much appreciated 

Jumbo frames even if they were supported would make no effective difference on the streamer. The efficiency difference between ethernet frames of MTU 1500 and jumbo frames of MTU 9000 is  94.93% and 99.14% respectively.

Yes NASs talking to each other can benefit from using jumbo frames - but ensure your connecting switch can support them AND has effective internal buffering otherwise you might actually find performance falls with the use of jumbo frames and yes frames to the streamer may then also be dropped.... one needs visibility of what is happening to confirm whether the switch is handling the frames properly and so I wouldn't normally recommend jumbo frames on non managed switches with no stats even if they are supported.

Simon

Posted on: 05 January 2017 by FDesvaux

Many thanks Simon for your complete and detailed answer.

Best way to know for sure is always to test it right? So I did the test : performance improvement between the 2 NASs was effectively there, but not much. For every other device on the network it was actually a performance loss, so I reverted all settings back to normal 1500 MTU size, and performance was back to nominal.

Thanks all who paricipated to this post !

Francis