Short cycle times can be achieved since the host microprocessors in the slave devices are not involved in the processing of the Ethernet packets to transfer the process images. All process data communication is handled in the slave controller hardware. Combined with the functional principle this makes EtherCAT a high performance distributed I/O system: Process data exchange with 1000 distributed digital I/O takes about 30 μs, which is typical for a transfer of 125 byte over 100Mbit/s Ethernet. Data for and from 100 servo axis can be updated with up to 10 kHz. Typical network update rates are 1–30 kHz, but EtherCAT can be used with slower cycle times, too, if the DMA load is too high.