Procurve 5400 Multicast routing performance

[Ethan sommer]

What sort of performance should I expect when routing multicast using PIM-SM on a procurve 5400 switch?

I assumed when we purchased the switch that the "Routing/switching capacity:" of "288 Gbps" was the most relevent datapoint in the specifications.

However, when I try to send multicast video over the switch, it works perfectly on the VLAN the video is coming from, but starts to lose packets on the vlans it is being routed to after about 8Mbps of video, which is much less than 1% of the specified routing capacity. (At which point the switch's CPU is up to about 70%, more video streams raise the CPU usage higher.)

Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong which might make PIM-SM perform so badly? PIM-DM is much better, not perfect, but we have to use PIM-SM to integrate with Internet2 multicast networking.

[Matt Hobbs]

Good question. Since performance on the same VLAN works fine it seems that IGMP is working well, likewise with PIM-DM. With PIM-SM do you get the same problem if the other VLAN is one directly connected to the same switch? Where is the RP?

[Matt Hobbs]

Just reading some more on PIM-SM, it seems that it initially will use the RP Tree which encapsulates the multicast traffic, but it will switch to Shortest Path Tree if possible which does not need to encapsulate the traffic. It is this encapsulation that I'm guessing is hitting your performance as it would have to be done in software.

Can you verify if yours is switching to SPT? 'show ip pim mroute' and 'show ip pim mroute [< multicast-group-address >
< multicast-source-address >]' should give you some more clues as to whether it's using RPT or SPT.

As a test with 2 VLANs configured, a multicast server in one VLAN, and a host in the other, it should move to SPT very rapidly from what I understand. Maybe try testing the performance of PIM-SM in this basic type of setup.