Jumbo frame

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In computer networking, jumbo frames are Ethernet frames above 1518 bytes in size. The most commonly supported implementations of hardware support for jumbo frames have a MTU of 9000 bytes. Jumbo frames, while sometimes used on a LAN, are rarely used when exchanging data, especially over the Internet. See also Jumbogram.

[edit] Creation

The original 1518 byte MTU for Ethernet was used because of the high error rates and low speed of communications. Thus, if one receives a corrupted packet, only 1518 bytes must be resent to correct the error.

However, each frame requires that the network hardware and software process it. If the frame size is increased, the same amount of data can be transferred with less effort. This reduces CPU utilization (i.e from 100% to 50%) and increases throughput (5-10%) by allowing the system to concentrate on the data in the frames, instead of the frames around the data.

Jumbo frames gained initial prominence when Alteon WebSystems introduced them in their ACEnic GbE adapters. [1] Many other vendors also created proprietary implementations, however they did not become part of the official IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard.