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How bad is it to daisy chain multiple switches on a home network?

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superczar

Occasional Visitor
I have a home network with a little over 75 device although most of them are IoT devices
The average traffic flow is somewhat higher than a typical home especially LAN traffic.

While most areas in the house can work with wireless alone (3X orbi, all wireless backhaul) - 3 sections do need wired mandatorily (A-C) and D is a good to have.
Section A is where the Internet fiber comes in (Kitchen)
Section B is the living room AV rack that also houses my automation server / NAS etc
Section C is a study/ HT AV setup on a different floor.
Section D is a balcony / sitout where I sometimes do office work from

Existing in-wall cabling is some really old ethernet cable that simply cannot do gigabit
Since I cannot run cables from A-B-C as the crow flies without some major civil work, I have no choice but to run cables through the outer boundary which makes the cable runs fairly long.

Currently I have a single cable running around the house that goes from :
Router (Section A) -> Switch 1 (Section B) -> short run to switch 2 (Section D) -> Long run to switch 3 (Section D)

Each switch has multiple wired devices connected , esp switch 1 and 3
The run distances are 20 meters , 10 meters and 50 meters respectively

Q1 - Pings across wired devices are all < 1ms, does that indicate that this topology is good enough?

Q2 - I keep hearing that daisy chaining is a bad practice , now I can imagine that in an office setup, a single cable for 5-10 heavy data usage machines will cause bottlenecks on a single cable uplink- but is that all there is to it ?
Or are there any other drawbacks?

(In my case, a single gbe Link between all segments is adequate and more)

Q3 - While the network works fine for the most part, there is some flakiness on the LAN I see once in a while (e.g intermittent delays esp on multicast like when intiiating airplay or play-fi)
Now am not sure if the root cause is general protocol issues or if it has anything to do with my topology
Would it be worthwhile to go through the effort of either in-house recabling or to do multiple external runs from A->B, A->C and A->D ?

PS: Switches are all unmanaged gbe
router is an edgerouter-x and APs are Orbis
 
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daisy chain
Daisy chaining too many switches is not good doing it anywhere. Businesses use stacked switches and chassis mounted switches to avoid this problem.
 
While it isn't ideal it probably works better than using WiFi and a MESH network.
 
It is not a real problem for home use unless you are exceeding the bandwidth between the switches, as you are aggregating switches onto one uplink. If your not exceeding the bandwidth of the ports between switches the only other thing that can be a problem is an outage, as there are more points of failure. One failure of a cable or the switch nearest the router and the whole network looses connectivity. I am in the same boat in my house. I actually have one connection that goes through 5 switches before it gets to my router. Even at that it beats wireless for sure as each switch adds almost no latency. Troubleshooting can also be more involved if there is a problem.
 

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