[nsp] SAA really a true measure?

[jeff.marsh at shaw.ca]

>From the "Re: [nsp] intermitten ping lags on 7500/rsp4/256M" discussion, Dmitri Kalintsev wrote:

> ...but, at much closer look, quite useless. ;) Routers are there 
> to *route*
> packets, not to reply to ICMP queries. That is why ICMP processing 
> is given
> such a low priority (and not only by Cisco).
> 
> If somebody needs to measure their network characteristics *so* badly,
> there's always Cisco SAA which seems to be part of almost 
> everything Cisco
> has nowdays that runs IOS (no, I didn't look at fn, because I'm 
> stubborn and
> lazy).

But does SAA really provide a true measure - with what type of priority do the routers respond to SAA queries? - obviously if SAA is used with only ICMP (ie without using the SAA responder) the measurements are going to be pretty much useless because of the low priority on ICMP processing...

\|/ JRM \|/