NIC Bonding

[dbradford]

Has anyone done anything with bonding 2 usb nics together on a series 2 tivo to increase the download speed from the tivo to the pc?

[Jamie]

Has anyone done anything with bonding 2 usb nics together on a series 2 tivo to increase the download speed from the tivo to the pc?I think it is highly unlikely this would offer any performance improvement. The raw speed of the network devices is not the bottleneck, and bonding two NICs together will only increase the CPU overhead, which is the bottleneck. The best bet to get better performance is to go gige with jumbo frames. Larger frames reduces the number of frames transmitted, which does reduce CPU overhead. Other tricks, like disabling netfilter in the kernel, can also reduce CPU overhead.