Default Route causes Poor Performace

[bu_bwtaylor]

Hi

  We have a 3226 switch that has had the consistant problem that any time the default route is set the perfromance of the switch becomes terrible. 

  When the default route is disabled ping times through the switch to host on the other side are less than 1 ms however when the default route is enable the ping times are greater than 2ms with periodic time up to 50-100 ms.

   Any ideas why this would be the case?

     Thanks In Advance.

[bu_bwtaylor]

Hi

  We have a 3226 switch that has had the consistant problem that any time the default route is set the perfromance of the switch becomes terrible. 

  When the default route is disabled ping times through the switch to host on the other side are less than 1 ms however when the default route is enable the ping times are greater than 2ms with periodic time up to 50-100 ms.

   Any ideas why this would be the case?

     Thanks In Advance.

[Fred_Mancen_1]

Maybe when you enable the default route the passing traffic increases the CPU to unsupported levels to this model. Did you already see how are the switch statistics (as CPU and memory utilization) while this default route is enabled? I believe that this 3226 does not handle too much traffic, what causes this performance degradation.

HTH

[bu_bwtaylor]

    I can't understand why a default route would cause a performance hit. It would seem to me that adding the default route would increase the performance. Having dealt with this issue without a satisfactory solution, it looks like my boss is going to migrate us to Cisco.

    Brian

[Fred_Mancen_1]

Brian, the 3226 switch is an older model, it's discontinued by 3Com and obviously doesn't have a performance like the newer models. But, in the other hand, your environment is small, and wouldn't create enough traffic to force in the 3226 switch a CPU overhead, teorically.

Maybe there is a problem in your network, not specifically in the switch, or even in the hardware of the switch or a bad NIC (a bad NIC can generate a lot of broadcasts in the network, causing broadcast storms).

Regards

[marcos]

We have a 3250 switch in use here which is in the same product line. Although it's a fine switch on layer 2, its layer 3 performance is so poor I wonder why it was advertised as having such capabilities. We solved the problem by buying an additional Baseline 2928 switch which has other quirks, but at least routing performance is acceptable.