Today’s CPUs are overwhelmed by Ethernet traffic, with an increasing amount of CPU cycles being consumed by TCP/IP packet processing. An additional CPU can be added to share the load when this imbalance causes application performance to suffer, but this is an expensive solution with several other drawbacks. In this article, Alan discusses how the addition of a Network Accelerator Card (NAC) with an integrated TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) can relieve the burden on the CPU.
