Jumbo frame

Jumbo frames gained initial prominence in 1998, when Alteon WebSystems introduced them in their ACEnic Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

[4] Many other vendors also adopted the size; however, jumbo frames are not part of the official IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard.

Jumbo frames have the potential to reduce overheads and CPU cycles[5] and have a positive effect on end-to-end TCP performance.

The use of 9000 bytes as preferred payload size for jumbo frames arose from discussions within the Joint Engineering Team of Internet2 and the U.S. federal government networks.

[13] Support of Castagnoli CRC polynomial within a general-purpose transport designed to handle data chunks, and within a TCP transport designed to carry SCSI data, both provide improved error detection rates despite the use of jumbo frames where an increase of the Ethernet MTU would otherwise have resulted in a significant reduction in error detection.

[14] Jumbo frames can increase the efficiency of Ethernet and network processing in hosts by reducing the protocol overhead, as shown in the following example with TCP over IPv4.

The processing overhead of the hosts can potentially decrease by the ratio of the payload sizes (approximately six times improvement in this example).

This however implies the scaling of numerous intermediating logic circuits along the network path to accommodate the maximum frame size required.

[citation needed] The main factor involved is an increase in the available memory buffer size in every intervening persistence mechanism along the path.

These theoretical limits for the Internet Protocol (IP) MTU, however, are reached only on networks that have a suitable link-layer infrastructure.