Unmanaged switches — These switches have no configuration interface or options. They are plug-and-play. They are typically the least expensive switches, found in home, SOHO, or small businesses. They can be desktop or rack mounted.
Managed switches — These switches have one or more ways, or interfaces, to modify the operation of the switch. Common management methods include: a serial console or Command Line Interface accessed via telnet or Secure Shell; an embedded Simple Network Management Protocol SNMP agent allowing management from a remote console or management station; a web interface for management from a web browser. Examples of configuration changes that one can do from a managed switch include: enable features such as Spanning Tree Protocol; set port speed; create or modify VLANs, etc.
Two sub-classes of managed switches are marketed today:
Smart (or intelligent) switches — These are managed switches with a limited set of management features. Likewise "web-managed" switches are switches which fall in a market niche between unmanaged and managed. For a price much lower than a fully managed switch they provide a web interface (and usually no CLI access) and allow configuration of basic settings, such as VLANs, port-speed and duplex.[10]
Enterprise Managed (or fully managed) switches - These have a full set of management features, including Command Line Interface, SNMP agent, and web interface. They may have additional features to manipulate configurations, such as the ability to display, modify, backup and restore configurations. Compared with smart switches, enterprise switches have more features that can be customized or optimized, and are generally more expensive than "smart" switches. Enterprise switches are typically found in networks with larger number of switches and connections, where centralized management is a significant savings in administrative time and effort. A Stackable switch is a version of enterprise-managed switch.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_switch
I would explain in more personal detail, but the wiki explains it pretty well.
see http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk621/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094954.shtml
there are a lot of things involved with those timers, some of the things you seem to be concerned about look like premature optimization...
things you should do:
You want your core switch to be the spanning tree root. Set the bridge priority on your core switch to the lowest value. IOS lets you use the special priority 'primrary' which sets it to 8192, so I suppose you could use that. Make sure end user ports have portfast and bdpuguard or whatever Netgear supports for saying "this port should not feed other switches"
maximize hello time to minimize chatter (similar reasons to above)
I would not touch this, it affects everything else. I'm pretty sure increasing the hello time increases the time it takes to detect a loop, which is not what you want.
minimize forward delay to start sending actual packets as quickly as possible
This can be helpful if a cable is unplugged, but really it is only going to save you at most 30 seconds or so, which may not be enough to make it worthwhile.
increase path cost on standard ports to avoid connected machines from hijacking traffic
In ciscoland for end user ports you would enable portfast and bdpuguard and all that fun stuff.. end user ports should not be participating in spanning tree in the first place, so the port cost isn't really relevant.
decrease path cost on the link to the core switch to indicate preferable path
Should not need to do this if you make the core the spanning tree root
increase priority on the link to the core (same as above)
Should not need to do this if you make the core the spanning tree root
can these changes have impact on network performance (both lag and transfer speeds)?
No. The only thing they can help with is faster recovery if someone unplugs/reboots a switch. I'm going to assume that if that were to happen, any game in progress is going to get interrupted, so having it come back online after 15 seconds instead of 45 isn't going to make much of a difference to the players.
If you don't have a looped topology(aka redundant layer 2 links) then spanning tree isn't actually doing a whole lot.
Best Answer
You are correct. Actually, you can see a bridge with three ports in IEEE 802.1D standard. ( See Figure 7-1—A Bridged Local Area Network ).
Okay, I found this article: "The 10 Most Important Products of the Decade":
It sheds some light on the origin of the term "switch" and some quick quotes from the article will clarify several important points which cause endless confusion...