Noticed my office's network slowdowns trace back to a bad switch upgrade 8 months ago

We switched out all our old Netgear switches for some managed ones back in February and the complaints about lag started about a week later. Turns out the new switches had flow control enabled by default while the old ones didn't, and it was causing packet drops on our older printers. Has anyone else seen major performance changes from a seemingly simple setting tweak?

2 comments

2 Comments

wadew511mo ago

Honestly I kinda see it different here. Flow control is actually a pretty standard feature on managed switches and it usually helps more than it hurts. If your old printers can't handle basic flow control then that's more of a printer problem than a switch problem lol. Those old Netgears probably just hid the issue by silently dropping packets instead. You gotta look at it like this - the network was already broken, you just didn't have the visibility to see it before. The real lesson is always check what your endpoints can handle before you roll out new infrastructure.

avery2191mo ago

Man, I feel your pain on that one. "Simple setting tweak" is exactly how IT horror stories start, isn't it? In my experience, flow control is one of those things that can really mess up a network if the devices on the other end aren't expecting it. It's wild how one checkbox can turn into a whole investigation eight months later. I've seen similar stuff happen with a few client networks where a "minor" firmware update would kill performance on older gear. Your mileage may vary, but I'd bet those printers are going to keep causing headaches unless you either disable flow control on those switch ports or swap them out. Hang in there, man. Network gremlins are the worst.