wire speed

networking

Forwarding at the full rate of the medium with no queueing loss - the benchmark claim every datasheet makes and every RFC 2544 test verifies.

Read the fine print: at which frame size? 64-byte wire speed is the honest number.

Wire speed means a device processes traffic as fast as the interface can deliver it, with no loss regardless of load. It is the difference between a specification that describes a peak and one that describes a floor, and vendors are careful about which they claim.

The number that matters is not bits per second but packets per second, because per-packet work is roughly constant regardless of size. A ten gigabit interface carrying maximum-size frames handles under a million packets a second; the same interface carrying minimum-size frames handles nearly fifteen million. A device that is wire speed for large frames may collapse at small ones, which is why small-packet performance is the honest test and why denial-of-service traffic tends to be small packets.

The qualification to look for is which features were enabled during the test. Forwarding at wire speed with a simple configuration is common; doing it with access control lists, deep inspection, encryption and logging all active is a different claim entirely, and the difference between the two is where most real deployments live. Reading a datasheet means finding the footnote that says what was turned off.

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