What are differences between balance-rr and 802.3ad

bondingnetworking

I know bonding modes, I know about balance-rr and 802.3ad. Both provide fault tolerance and some how increase the link throughput.

My question is when we can use balance-rr without any need to switch support why anyone should ever want to use 802.3ad??

Best Answer

From this page regarding balance-rr:

This mode is the only mode that will permit a single TCP/IP connection to stripe traffic across multiple interfaces. It is therefore the only mode that will allow a single TCP/IP stream to utilize more than one interface's worth of throughput. This comes at a cost, however: the striping often results in peer systems receiving packets out of order, causing TCP/IP's congestion control system to kick in, often by retransmitting segments.

And regarding 802.3ad:

The 802.3ad standard also mandates that frames be delivered in order (within certain limits), so in general single connections will not see misordering of packets.

So 802.3ad provides better ordering of packets which avoids TCP retransmissions.

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