For the longest time, I was painfully aware that I was not utilising my 10GbE network switches and NICs to its fullest.

Having to finally sit down, build, test and optimise a software firewall using 10GbE interfaces for some organisation I volunteer at and therefore having to test it in my home lab, I finally was “forced” to sit down and “optimise” my local home lab.

An iperf3 test was not showing good numbers – bouncing around the ~8Gbps mark on a 10Gbps network.

Without fluffing around with kernel and IP stack tweaks, I was aware the easiest way to eke out better performance was to increase the MTU…

I had already, by default, enabled “jumbo packets” on all the networking equipment (switches, routers, etc.) – but not the end points.

On Windows, the method to do so varies but is typically done within the specific network card’s interface configuration.

Since I was using Hyper-V, I had to also make the change on the virtual interfaces where the VMs sat on as well…

On the Linux box, it was much easier.

Then pinging the box from Windows and from Linux to confirm.

The before and after result?