[OpenIndiana-discuss] no external connectivity on link

[Jason Matthews]

> Are you prepared for no-improvement? Ethernet link aggregation often 
> disappoints people looking for more performance using IP.


It may a reasonable effect if:
1) you are already saturating the link
2) you have sufficient number of partners and they you doing large block
transfers

If you have a single machine just talking to one other machine, LACP will
not help by definition. You likely need a faster link.

Given the above, LACP can help if you tune your stack and your apps know how
to leverage the tuning. I have spent a number of years working in search and
lacp has been run of the mil. Typically I would see 1.2 Gb/s from boxes
whose job it was to forward search indexes to searchers even, if in some
cases, going over a router. This of course was on an optimized stack. I seem
to recall Hadoop clusters going has high as 1.4Gb/s in our environment.

LACP is good for link redundancy on servers connected to virtualized
chassis.  I use this instead of IPMP. LACP is even better for distributing
load on switches, which was the original intent of etherchannel from which
LACP rose. 

j.