Hi everyone,
I hope I'm in the right place here in the hardware section. I've been a silent reader here for a while, especially regarding the coding tutorials, but now I have a purely technical question where I could use some advice based on experience.
Here's the scenario: I'm currently setting up a small home server (intended for various uses later on, perhaps a small SA-MP test server or Minecraft for my colleagues). Since my office is unfortunately at the other end of the apartment and I have a lot of interference along the way (old electrical wiring, a microwave directly against the wall facing the hallway, etc.), I've decided to connect everything not with a standard copper cable (Cat7), but with a short fiber optic cable to provide galvanic isolation and avoid interference. I know that might sound like overkill for a home network, but I enjoy tinkering.
Now to the actual hardware configuration:
From the router, the connection goes to a converter, then via fiber optic cable to my office, and from there back to copper for the switch. I'm using a Media Converter 10-100-1000 for this , since my old switch in my office doesn't have a native SFP module, and I wanted to remain flexible in case I connect older hardware (100 Mbps) in the future. Theoretically, this device should automatically negotiate the speed.
Everything's working fine, but I've noticed occasional strange ping spikes when there's a lot of traffic on the connection. Back in the day at LAN parties (remember those? Switch, cable across the room, done), we practically never had these kinds of problems, as long as the cable wasn't kinked. The technology was just simpler back then.
I have a suspicion that the auto-negotiation between the converter and my somewhat older switch sometimes "gets stuck," especially when the switch is under load. The converter supports 10/100/1000 Mbps adaptively, but I'm unsure whether I should perhaps set the port on the switch to a fixed 1000 Mbps full duplex instead of leaving it on auto.
Does anyone have experience using fiber optic converters for home game servers? Or is this rather counterproductive for latency-critical applications because you unnecessarily lose milliseconds through the conversion (light -> electricity -> light)?
Maybe I'm just imagining it and the bottleneck lies somewhere else entirely, but I wanted to rule out the hardware issue before dissecting the server configurations.
It would be great if someone had a thought on this!
Greetings