Amount of switches into a router? Limits?

[MarkL54]

Is there a limit on how many switches I can plug into a router? Is there a rule of what kind of router to get in relation to how many switches I want connect to it? Is it possible to overload router if, let's say, I use all 5 available LAN ports on the router (basic router from ISP) and plug 48 port switch into every port? Do I need to upgrade to a better router? How do I determine what kind of router I will need so it won't get fried?

Thank you.

 

[bill001g]

If all the ports are 1g then you will run out of ISP bandwidth well before you hit any limit I suspect.

There likely is a limit to how many mac addresses the switch internal to the router can handle but even the little 4 port consumer switch I have see list 2000 as being the mac limit.

The lan ports are a small switch in the router and are usually done with a separate asic chip. So the traffic that just passes between them puts no load on the main processor at all and since it is done with asic the chip can normally run all ports at maximum speed.

I suspect the actual router limitation will be the number of NAT entries or maybe the size of the subnet....some routers will only allow you to put in a /24 subnet.

 

[Kewlx25]

Theoretical limit is almost limitless. The first real practical limitation is most switches can only handle up to 8000 MAC addresses in their state table at a time. You're probably going to run into two other limitations, WAN side bandwidth, and performance limitations of your router. As long as not everyone hits it at once, it may be fine.