SG Broadband Community

Hi Philip!

I'm using Asus 5300 (merlin) router with NAT acceleration enabled. As it is explained in your article, when this feature is enabled Tcp/Ip stack flow control is bypassed. I just would like to confirm if it make sense to turn on the flow control of the NIC in order to manage the packets? If you don't, what happens to packet management? This might cause packet drops and poor throughput right?

Hello Mark

They are separate things... NAT Acceleration refers to the router's (Linux in most cases) TCP/IP stack, whether the full stack of options is used, or a faster subset. It only makes a difference in very fast Internet connections, there is a bit more info on it in this FAQ as well: https://www.speedguide.net/faq/what-is- ... ration-495

NIC Flow control is the Windows driver of the Network adapter trying to manage the flow of data, and is usually a bad idea. Most types of packet manipulation by the NIC introduce some lag, that's why we recommend turning them off, with some small exceptions like checksum calculations.