[c-nsp] Understanding ASR1k / ESP40 capacity

[Simon Lockhart]

All,

I'm banging my head against a brick wall trying to get sensible answers from
Cisco TAC, so thought I'd ask the educated masses who may have come across
this before...

I've got a Cisco ASR1004 with RP2, ESP40, 2 * SIP40's, and 8 * 10GE ports.

A snapshot of usage on these ports at peak is:

Interface         RxBps     RxPps          TxBps     TxPps
Te0/0/0	  4,385,563,000   515,508    906,118,000   339,997
Te0/1/0	  3,942,338,000   419,696    984,150,000   358,436
Te0/2/0	  3,949,993,000   425,192    933,257,000   349,145
Te0/3/0	  4,375,526,000   512,858    873,284,000   334,751
Te1/0/0	  1,186,440,000   454,714  5,474,029,000   630,916
Te1/1/0	    622,154,000   244,056  3,181,689,000   338,190
Te1/2/0	    711,493,000   253,275  3,211,560,000   340,950
Te1/3/0	  1,218,873,000   437,195  4,831,708,000   568,488

TOTAL  	 20,392,380,000 3,262,494 20,395,795,000 3,260,873

I'm seeing throughput issues on a portchannel consisting of Te0/0/0 and Te0/3/0
(it won't go over 10Gbps aggregate)

Cisco TAC are telling me if I add TxBps and RxBps totals together, I get 40Gbps,
so I've reached capacity of the QFP (i.e. ESP40).

My arguement against this is that a packet which enters the router on Te0/0/0,
goes through the SIP40 in slot 0, through the ESP40, through the SIP40 in slot
1, and out through Te1/0/0 is still just one packet, so should only need to be
counted once through the ESP, and once for each SIP. Hence, the throughput on
the ESP is only 20.3Gbps on those numbers above.

If I poll ceqfpUtilProcessingLoad by SNMP, I see peaks of around 65%, which 
would correlate with this level of throughput.

I'm assuming there are others of you using this platform. What sort of 
throughput are you seeing? Am I right, or is the Cisco TAC engineer?

TIA,

Simon