Jtdylktuy

up vote 0 down vote favorite A software vendor I work with requires gigabit ethernet connections for a classical client-server software setup. To my surprised question why they would need to transfer such a large amount of data between client and server, the vendor answered that they don't transfer any large, but many small packets. He told me that in their experience, this works a lot faster on gigabit than 10 or 100 megabit connections. Having understood ethernet as a serial connection and transfer speed being limited mostly by the medium (fibre, copper, etc.), I am puzzled. Is there a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon as explained by the vendor that I may be missing? My background is not exactly in hardware so maybe there are optimization measures in gigabit standards that somehow optimize for this special case.