You may not be losing much sleep over how your database affects your network, but here's a wake-up call: Databases today are more likely than ever to cause network congestion. With advances in database and hardware technology, it's not unusual to have a database server with eight CPUs, 2 GB of memory and two, or even four, teamed NICs. The network can become the bottleneck for this supersize database, especially if the network wasn't designed to handle supersize traffic. A database generates bursty traffic on the network because it waits for requests and then returns the result sets in spurts. Until recently, the limitations in database file system I/O, CPU time, memory and network-access speed kept databases and their bursty payloads from taxing the network. Other servers, including FTP servers, emit bursty traffic on the network, too.
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