Understanding load average
It is not a percentage, and a load of 8 may be perfectly healthy.
Writing
performance
TCP over long fat pipes
High bandwidth and high latency together defeat default TCP settings.
Jumbo frames: worth it, or not
They help in specific places and cause silent breakage everywhere else. Decide deliberately.
The difference between a slow network and a busy one
Both feel identical to users. They have different causes and different fixes.
Duplex mismatch: the fault that hides in plain sight
The link is up, the speed is right, and throughput is terrible. Check the counters, not the status.