[c-nsp] Are there any disadvantages to aggressive netflow aging on a 6509?

Matthew.Coleman-Hamilton at servicebirmingham.co.uk Matthew.Coleman-Hamilton at servicebirmingham.co.uk
Mon Jul 4 10:59:01 EDT 2011


I've recently enable netflow across the bulk of our 6509 estate and have, 
after reading various guides, posts and pieces of advice settled on a 
fairly aggressive set of mls aging timers (the estate is a mixture of 
Sup720-3B and 3BXL supervisors):-
mls aging long 64
mls aging normal 32
mls aging fast time 16
ip flow-cache timeout active 1
ip flow-cache timeout inactive 15
This seems to be having the desired affect in that TCAM utilisation is not 
approaching 100% and there doesn't appear to have been any significant 
increase in CPU utilisation (the EARL NDE task pops up in the process list 
on occasion when I check but seems to be using single figure % on the 
whole).
However, my question is whether there are any disadvantages to aggressive 
aging, i.e. am I potentially missing flow information or exporting 
incomplete flow information by moving away from the default settings and 
aging flows quicker?
TIA


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