Catalyst 4006 poor routing performance

[JoelH]

Hi,

I have a Catalyst 4006 which (i was told) is meant to be quite quick in the routing stakes.. my experience has been to the contrary.
With just a couple of simple static routes (100MB LAN Segment to 100MB LAN Segment) and my (3x) backup servers routing through it i am getting CPU utilisation well over %80 for the time period the backups are running. And if i run more host traffic through the switch i get noticable traffic delays.

Now i know that on a 4006 the CPU is expected to average around the %20 percent mark as it is monitoring switchport (5 x 48 ports) status, etherchannel etc... but i was suprised that it does not out perform a Cisco 2600 router! which does handle that traffic throughput easily.

can anyone else confirm this or is this perhaps more a mis-configuration issue.. which if so what kind of mis-configuration could cause this poor routing performance.

cheers

joel

 

[JoelH]

Well i thought i would post an update just in case anyone was interested.

Evidently the reason the my confusion over what performance to expect from a 4006 switch comes from the fact that there is a seperate hardware routing module available which routes extremely quick. As opposed to standard 4006 routing performance with the Supervisor CPU which is poor (as in my case).

cheers

joel

 

[BuckWeet]

What supervisor engine are you running?? Unless you have SUP III you cannot route inside the Supervisor..

If you have a SUP II or lower then you have to get the Layer 3 blade to be able to route..


There are a few things to check. Make sure you have "IP MLS" and "IP CEF" enabled...

I haven't worked on a 4006 in along time and I'm sure there might be a few more commands...


BuckWeet