What is uplink port speed on a dedicated server?

March 2, 2004 8:09 PM

Dedicated Server Question: What is uplink port speed? What is the difference between 10Mbps uplink and 100Mbps uplink?
posted by banished to computers & internet (5 comments total)

An uplink port is a port set aside for you to connect one piece of networking equipment to another (as opposed to a server or client computer). 10Mbps is about ten times slower than 100 Mbps. Mbps is MegaBits Per Second, so every eight seconds the equivalent MegaByte is transferred.
posted by taumeson at 8:37 PM on March 2, 2004

Put another way, there are 8 bits to a byte, 1024 bytes to a kilobyte and 1024 kilobytes to a megabyte. 100 Mbits = 100/8 MBytes = 12.4 MBytes/sec; 10 Mb = 1.24 MB/sec.
posted by squirrel at 9:22 PM on March 2, 2004

In terms of dedicated servers, the uplink port speed is most likely the speed of the connection between the server and the router to the backbone. If the host company's connection to the 'net in general is faster than your uplink speed (most likely the case), then the uplink port speed will be a bottleneck.

So a 100Mbps link will be able to send out data at ten times the rate of a 10Mbps link. If you are serving a lot of large files (specifically, more than 1 megabyte of data per second, often), this could matter. Otherwise, probably not.

Picture a network diagram. The Internet is a cloud. Your dedicated server has one pipe going to a router, and the router has a fatter pipe going into the cloud. The people accessing your server all have small pipes (er, it's all in how you use it ;-) coming from the cloud. Your connection to any one client will be limited by their connection/pipe, but your connection to all clients in total (at a given instant) will be limited by the pipe from your server to the router. So while one person's connection won't max out your uplink connection, multiple people connecting at the same time could.

Hope that helps (though I'm not sure I explained it well).
posted by whatnotever at 10:04 PM on March 2, 2004

the size of the link to the backbone matters less with respect to the size of the files served, and more with respect to the distribution of requests in time (burstiness of traffic).

If everyone and their brother hits your server at the same time, a 100mbps link will allow them to share a "wider path" from the internet to your server.

Metaphorically speaking, it's like building a mall near the highway. If you have a muddy track linking your mall to the highway, people will be able to get to your mall, but if they all show up at once, there will be delays. If you have a 6 lane road linking you to the highway, lots of people can arrive at the same time without significantly increasing the perceived delay.
posted by websavvy at 5:57 AM on March 3, 2004

I've always considered 10Mbps and 100Mbps, under real-world conditions, to be 1 megabyte/sec and 10 megabyte/sec respectively at optimal speeds.
posted by mrbill at 8:46 AM on March 3, 2004