Optimizing Network Hardware

Network performance depends on the quality of the network adapter card, the network protocol, and the type of network medium (such as twisted pair wire, optical fiber, or coaxial cable). Network adapters can provide widely varying levels of performance. In general, the characteristics of an adapter that can most affect performance involve the bus type, bus width, and the amount of the adapter's onboard memory. You should carefully plan how your system is set up and make sure it has adequate network bandwidth to handle the traffic between clients and servers.

For optimal network performance, you should install a high-performance network adapter card in the server, only use protocols that are necessary (and keep them to a minimum), and use multiple network cards and segment the Local Area Network (if appropriate).

If network is a performance bottleneck, you can:

• Use a higher speed network type such as 100MB-per-second Fast Ethernet.
• Use a high-performance network adapter and multithreaded driver.
• Segment your network by using multiple network adapters in a single server.
• Reduce the amount of network traffic by restricting users, limiting session time, or rescheduling selected processes.
• Restrict or redeploy some application services.

For More Information   For more information on scalable hardware architecture, search online for "Microsoft SQL Server Scalability" in MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0.