Description: This object controls whether cut-thru is enabled on the stack. Enabling cut-thru can help to minimise the delay experienced by packets before they are forwarded to their destination. Setting cut-thru to 'fastForward' causes frame forwarding to begin as soon as 32 bytes of the frame have been received. Setting it to 'fragmentFree' causes frame forwarding to begin when 64 bytes have been received. This is slower, but eliminates the risk of forwarding an illegally short frame to the destination port, however a valid length frame might still be forwarded even though it had a CRC error. Setting this object to 'storeAndForward' disables cut-thru completely, and frames will not be forwarded until they have been received in their entirety.

When the mode is set to intelligent, the effective switching mode is set initially to fast forward. The switch then monitors the total error rate of frames received on each port, and if it exceeds 20 error frames a second it changes the effective mode for the port to store and forward. If the error rate then drops to zero the effective mode is restored to fast forward.

Whatever forwarding mode is selected, cut-thru cannot operate if the destination port is currently involved in 'cut-thru' from another port. In this case the device will process the frame in store and forward mode.