Rate Limiting on Cisco Router

Fri Jul 9 05:50:19 UTC 2010

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> 
> With a G1 you'll be able to shape just fine, even do fancy stuff like 
> fair-queue within those 80 megs. I've done this on a NPE-300, but only 
> egress, and as long as packet sizes were fairly large (normal TCP 
> sessions with mostly 1500 byte packets + ACKs) it coped with 90 megs of 
> traffic. So with the added power of G1 you should definitely try before 
> ruling it out.
> 

Definitely worth the try. Your biggest enemy may be 12.4 IOS. It's 
bloated and buggy in my experience, but that has mostly been edge 
services. If 12.4 pegs your processor, you may want to check the 
software/hardware matrix and see if one of the older 12.0/2 service 
provider trains that they continued to add support for (probably some 
large customer's special requests). I don't know if it will support the 
G1, but if so, you might have better performance out of it.

> Shaping is so much better than the packet dropping that a rate limiter 
> does.
> 

Definitely. My favorite off the wall use of shaping was to smooth 
traffic flow on a Gig-e to reduce microbursts from overrunning the 
hardware rx on a 7513. :)

Jack