7206 VXR NPE-G1 throughput

Mon Feb 10 16:08:42 UTC 2014

On 02/10/2014 04:30 PM, Remco Bressers wrote:
> On 02/10/2014 04:17 PM, Vlade Ristevski wrote:
>> We are looking to double the bandwidth on one of our circuits from 300Mbps to 600Mbps. We currently use a Cisco 7206VXR with an NPE-G1 card. These seem like very popular routers so I'm hoping a few
>> people on this list have them deployed. If you or a customer have these deployed, how much bandwidth have you seen them handle? This will be handling dorm traffic at a college so it's mostly download.
>> The 7206 handles our 300 Mbps circuit just fine, but we are moving it to our 600Mbps circuit. At peak we've seen the following numbers for that circuit:
>>
>>
>>    30 second input rate 559982000 bits/sec, 55809 packets/sec
>>    30 second output rate 55429000 bits/sec, 32598 packets/sec
>>       267756984712 packets input, 333325152556755 bytes, 0 no buffer
>>
>> This is the interface that connects to our provider. As you can see its almost all download traffic. Our ASR1002 handles it without a sweat but I'm a little skeptical of whether the 7206 will hold up.
>
> This depends on multiple variables. The 7200 is a single-CPU platform where CPU can go sky-high when using features like ACL's, QoS, IPv6 and you name it.. Also, changing from IOS 12.4 to 15 increased
> our CPU usage with another 10%+. Stick to the bare minimum of features you really need and you will be fine.
>

I do share the same thoughts as Remco. We've actually several NPE-G1 in 
production environments with full BGP feed. We saw a decrease in 
forwarding performance since 12.4T and up. We also recently disabled 
some features like netflow and ip inspection, which seemed relatively 
CPU intensive.

I do remember we were able to forward around ~700Mbps of 1500 bytes 
traffic with old IOS images and no ACLs.