[c-nsp] Brief CPU spikes on 6500 Sup 720

[Matthias Müller]

Hi,

On Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:16:45 -0400 (EDT)
> The vlan in question had an arp timeout of 60s and had a couple of KVM 
> servers with 100 or so virtual machines.  Especially when a large number 
> of VMs started up, we'd see periods of packet loss.  My assumption is that 
> the sup720-3bxl can only handle so much arp activity on a vlan.  There was 
> nothing in the config to artificially limit arp traffic.

We've seen this issue here, too. The problem at our site was the synchronized arp request from some loadbalancers (synchronizing over time). Maybe that's the case here, too, that your virtual machines send out arp-requests for the default gateway during the same time and then the SUP misses some of these arp requests, has high cpu load and results in short traffic interruption for some hosts.
Syncronizing of stuff like that funnily happens often in network environments after some time if no precautions are taken and it can result in surprising effects.

Matthias