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Re: Catalyst 6500 High Switch Proc


From: "Philip L." <phil () mindfury net>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:34:28 -0500

Ross Vandegrift wrote:
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 04:35:28PM -0500, Philip L. wrote:
One thing to note, is that our main ACL for ingress traffic is applied here due to historical reasons. It's roughly 5000 single host entries at present. We also use these devices for NDE.

On a SUP7203BXL, if your ACL TCAM utilization is fine, this shouldn't
impact performance unless you're logging too much.  Since you've been
over the CPU utilization doc, I'm guessing you know that.

"show platform hardware capacity acl" will give you a breakdown on
your ACL TCAM usage.

I'm probably missing some other key details, but what could influence the SP like this? Any insight would be appreciated.

Cisco says that Netflow-based features always handle the first packet
of a flow in software, but I don't know if this is the RP or the SP.
It would make sense if a first-flow packet that didn't need punting
hit the SP and not the RP.  In that case, your traffic level with
netflow enabled could explain your high SP utilization.

It is a Sup720-3BXL. Based on the suggestions here, I went ahead and did 'no ip flow ingress' on all the interfaces just to see, and surely enough, the SP went down to about 10-15%. My colleague implemented packet count-based NetFlow sampling to attempt to reduce the 100% NetFlow TCAM usage, and it appears to be partially effective. It still fills up frequently, so we'll have to do some more tweaking.

I appreciate all the replies, public and private.

--
Philip L.


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