[Pc_Support] Bus Bottleneck Crash, No Bandwidth Left?

[Jason Boxman]

With all the talk of bus bottlenecking, I'm curious what exactly happens when 
you hit a bottleneck in the PCI bus, be it legacy PCI or PCIe?  Does it 
simply limit your peak performance or do you actually get worse performance 
when bottlenecking than if you peaked at 90% or whatever?  Should 
bottlenecking be avoided at all costs, or is it non fatal if you can live 
with the bus being your limiting factor?

A related question:  Can a device be sending on the PCI bus while another card 
receives or is the bus simple utilized or not utilized at any given moment?  
Put another way, since PCIe is often compared to a layer two switch, is the 
legacy PCI bus like a full duplex or half duplex HUB or something else?

-- 

Jason Boxman
http://edseek.com/ - Linux and FOSS stuff