Max numbers of switches

From my experience I never, ever, ever, ever daisy chain switches. Did I mention that I never, EVER, EVER daisy chain switches? If you need more than three switches, connect them all to a single switch (or pair of switches). Spanning-tree was designed about 15 years ago and is timing sensitive, cpu intensive, and is limited by the hardware it is running on. It works perfectly until it breaks, and then your ENTIRE network goes down. Troubleshooting spanning-tree is very difficult, so to minimize the interaction between switches means that you need to simplify the topology to the maximal extent possible, and the simplest design is two levels with a single or pair of switches at the top. When then manually set the BPDU priority on the two top switches so that root bridge (and secondary root) are known. The switches at the top are always the one ones with the relatively fastest CPU.

Scott

7 in a row is the theoretical limit for full-duplex connections. You may be able to get away with more... until the day it fails and everything goes crazy.

Original IEEE Specs was no more than seven bridges (Layer 2 switches) connected in series before layer 3 device.

That was mostly due to Spanning tree limitation.

However there is a performance trade off more switches.

I thought I had read somewhere was recommended for the 100mb Ethernet not to have more than two.

My experience, I try to have no more than two, can use more for light traffic but best not too if can help it.

M.