[pve-devel] network card MBit/s vs MB/s

[Dietmar Maurer]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG [mailto:s.priebe at profihost.ag]
> Sent: Montag, 18. Februar 2013 09:30
> To: Dietmar Maurer
> Cc: Andrew Thrift; pve-devel at pve.proxmox.com
> Subject: Re: [pve-devel] network card MBit/s vs MB/s
> 
> Hi,
> Am 18.02.2013 09:27, schrieb Dietmar Maurer:
> >>> But the ethernet speed limit refers to physically transferable bits,
> >>> and usually
> >>>
> >>> 9Bit = 1 Byte
> >>
> >> No idea what you mean but 8 bit is 1 byte. Also the whole internet
> >> refers to 8 bit.
> >
> > We talk about network card speed limit.
> > At network level, you need to transfer parity and stop bits, ethernet
> headers, ...
> >
> > So you need more the 8 bits to transfer one byte!
> 
> Yes but you also have the same overhead using MB/s so it doesn't matter.
> 
> 100Mbit/s => you can transfer around 12,5MB/s => that's a factor of 8.
> Just try it ;-)

To add more confusion, here is a quote from the iperf man page:

>TCP: When used for testing TCP capacity, Iperf measures the throughput of the payload. 
>One thing to note is that Iperf uses 1024*1024 for megabytes and 1000*1000 for megabits.

So what exactly is Mbit and MB above? 1024*1024bits or 1000*1000bits?