DELL N3000 User Manual

Switch Feature Overview

Flow control enables lower speed switches to communicate with higher speed 

switches by requesting that the higher speed switch refrain from sending 

packets for a limited period of time. Transmissions are temporarily halted to 

prevent buffer overflows.
For information about configuring flow control, see "Configuring Port-Based 

Head of Line (HOL) blocking prevention prevents traffic delays and frame 

loss caused by traffic competing for the same egress port resources. HOL 

blocking queues packets, and the packets at the head of the queue are 

forwarded before packets at the end of the queue.

The Alternate Store and Forward (ASF) feature reduces latency for large 

packets. When ASF is enabled, the memory management unit (MMU) can 

forward a packet to the egress port before it has been entirely received on the 

Cell Buffer Pool (CBP) memory. 
AFS, which is also known as cut-through mode, is configurable through the 

command-line interface. For information about how to configure the AFS 

feature, see the 

CLI Reference Guide available at 

Jumbo frames enable transporting data in fewer frames to ensure less 

overhead, lower processing time, and fewer interrupts.
For information about configuring the switch MTU, see "Configuring Port 

This feature is available on the N4000 series switches only.