[c-nsp] Trying to understand 7200 VXR memory ... need help please.

[Adrian Chadd]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008, Wilkinson, Alex wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We have a:
> 
>    Cisco 7204VXR (NPE200) processor (revision B) with 114688K/16384K bytes of memory.
> 
> We are loosing our EIGRP neighbour adjaceny due to exhausting our memory usage
> (i think): e.g.
> 
>    EIGRP: Retransmission retry limit exceeded

.. I don't think thats memory-related. You'd have allocation failures in your
syslog IIRC.

>    Jun 17 15:57:39 atm-router 11682: Jun 17 15:57:39: %DUAL-5-NBRCHANGE:
>    IP-EIGRP(0) 1: Neighbor xxx.xxx.xx.xx (ATM1/0.48) is down: retry limit exceeded
> 
> It appears that our 7200-VXR does indeed have 128MB DRAM i.e.
> 
>    "System Bootstrap, Version 11.1(13)CA, EARLY DEPLOYMENT RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
>     Copyright (c) 1997 by cisco Systems, Inc.
>     C7200 processor with 131072 Kbytes of main memory"
>                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Yup!

>            However, when I do a "show processes memory" I only see 32MB e.g
> 
>            Processor Pool Total:   30801656 Used:   28807740 Free:    1993916
>                  I/O Pool Total:   16777216 Used:    1563104 Free:   15214112
>                  PCI Pool Total:    4194304 Used:    1131968 Free:    3062336

Whats "show mem" tell you?

What IOS version are you using? How big is that image?

> Questions: 1. Can someone please confirm to me whether I do actually have 128MB of
>               main memory from the aforementioned output ?

Yup - IOS takes a whole chunk of it when its uncompressed at startup.

>            2. Why does a "show processes memory" only show 32MB in the
>               "Processor Pool Total" ?

Thats whats left over after the system allocates its stuff.

>            3. Is main memory (DRAM) divided up into "Pools" ? And can i change
>               how this divided up ?

I forget. There are commands to change the main/IO split but I forget exactly
which NPEs have static RAM for packet processing and when it matters.
Its been a while since I had to care. :)




adrian