On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: > On Friday, December 02, 2011 11:43:48 AM Les Mikesell wrote: >> Nobody cares much about hardware/network efficiency these days since >> you are likely to have plenty except in those marginal wifi areas, but >> broadcasts get accepted by every NIC on the network and pushed up the >> network stacks until something drops them, where multicasts are only >> accepted by things that are configured to want them. > > Assuming multicast is more efficient than broadcast in a small environment, who cares whether it gets pushed up the stack, there's plenty of CPU to deal with it, right? Who needs efficiency in the network stack with plenty of CPU, no? > > Sorry, couldn't resist; if you're going to care about efficiency on the network stack you shouldn't ignore efficiency on the wire. I'd hazard to say that you have more overcapacity of CPU to deal with the network stack than you have overcapacity on the physical network, at 1Gb/s, not to mention 100Mb/s. At 10Gb/s maybe not. > > But, lacking metrics, it's somewhat of a moot point. My point is that every device on your network has to process every broadcast packet. Maybe you have CPU overkill on all your computers, but you might also have some dumb controllers too. And they have to go out the wifi too. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com