Cell Relay Archive

[jwills@melpar.esys.com (Jeffrey M. Wills)]

In article <3n29er$nfa@alterdial.UU.NET>, guru@deltanet.com says...
>
>In <3mv3kn$680@hpindda.cup.hp.com>, raj@cup.hp.com (Rick Jones) writes:
>>Christopher Whyte (cwhyte@wellfleet.com) wrote:
>>: Also, don't get caught up in the latency game.
>
>>Can you expand on that a little? On the surface, it would seem to
>>imply that latency is unimportant.
>
>Whether or not latency is important depends entirely upon your application.
>If you are basically using ATM to transfer huge computer files from one
>machine to another, latency is probably not important.  On the other hand,
>if you are doing live voice/video applications, latency is THE MOST IMPORTANT
>measurement you can take on any given switch.
>
>Obviously, the original poster comes from the "huge computer files" crowd.
>Me, I'm from the voice/video crowd, and minimum latency is about the only thing
>that is critical to me. ;-)
>
>/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>|     Bill Schultz     A Warped Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste.....
>|                                     Use OS/2 Warp: Waste Not, Want Not.....
>

Bill, could you give us an idea of what you would expect might be 
an acceptable latency through a switch.  In many applications
I've seen numbers on the order of milliseconds or hundreds
of microseconds, which is very low indeed for most ATM switch
architectures I know of.

Dr Jeff
jwills@melpar.esys.com
E-Systems, Inc. Ashburn, VA.