Receive Segment Coalescing (RSC)
Receive Segment Coalescing (RSC) is an offload technology in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 that can help reduce how much of the CPU is used in network processing.
RSC works by using the network interface card (NIC), which looks at the data from incoming packets and strips them before combining -- or coalescing -- these segments into a singular packet. The NIC will then send this coalesced packet to an application, resulting in the CPU needing to intervene much less on the receive-side. This, in turn, allows the CPU to take care of other important tasks, including increased productivity and scalability support. RSC only supports the receive-side of network traffic, so it does not affect outgoing network traffic.
To use RSC, administrators must have a network adapter card that is RSC-capable. If the organization has a virtualized environment, the NIC must also be able to support single-root I/O virtualization.
