[e2e] on local ethernet throughput?

[David P. Reed]

The arguments about local ethernet throughput are interesting, but it's 
worth noting two things:

1) Today's Ethernet is not your grandparents' Ethernet.  The analyses of 
the old days are pessimistic compared to the tiny& controlled arbitration 
environments that are presented by hubs, full-duplex, and switches.

2) Ethernet was and still is intended to be operated at relatively light 
duty cycles (compared to the max capacity of the shared medium/switch) - 
the behavior as you approach saturation is important because loads are 
peaky, but those peaks are expected to be transient.  So the most important 
thing is that the system not have any hysteresis (history-dependent 
behavior) effect as loads peak and decay back.

So the original question about "local Ethernet throughput" is actually not 
fully answered by the old studies - in some ways hubs behave a lot more 
like Token Ring than the old coax nets do.