Understanding Performance Measurement Units

People who make networking hardware, or write materials that try to tell you how to operate it, use many terms to describe performance, such as throughput and bandwidth. (These terms are explained in the previous section.) In addition, they also use several different units to measure performance. Unfortunately, these units are often used incorrectly, and they are also very similar to each other in name. Worse, they also have overlapping abbreviations, and lots of people use these abbreviations without making clear what the heck they are talking about. Isn't that great?

Bits and Bytes

The first issue is the infamous letter B. Or rather, I should say, the matter of the big B and the little b. By popular ...

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