5304XL & PIM routing performance

[Sergey Yr Goncharov]

Hi all!
We planning to use 5304XL switches as an edge multicast distribution switches in our network. I found this in the last release notes for the firmware v10.23:
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Heavy Memory Usage with PIM-DM
Heavy use of PIM (Many S/G--source-group--flows over many VLANs) combined with other memoryintensive
features, can oversubscribe memory resources and impact overall performance. If available
memory is exceeded, the switch drops any new multicast flows, and generates appropriate log
messages.
-cut-
Anybody knows the exact limitations for these conditions will occure? How many source groups/destination VLANs ? We planning to provide up to 50 source groups and to replicate these flows up to 10-20 vlans simulteniously. Is it too much or no?
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WBR, Serhio.

[Stuart Teo]

It's unclear what the "other memory intensive features" are but a good guess would be stuff like mesh and mstp and esp when everything is turned on.

We don't use our 5300xl for PIM, does it support Sparse mode? Any reason why you have to stick with Dense mode?

[Sergey Yr Goncharov]

Hi,

>It's unclear what the "other memory >intensive
>features" are but a good guess would be
>stuff
>like mesh and mstp and esp when
>everything is turned on.
None of these features are planned to be used. We need an OSPF with about 5-8k unicast routes and a PIM routing with up to 50 mcast flows (up to 4-5 mbps each) which could be replicated over 10-20 destination VLANs.

>We don't use our 5300xl for PIM, does it
>support Sparse mode?
According to switch manuals - NO.

We don't use 5300xl at all yet :-). Now I've got single test 5304 switch. We plan to use these switches instead of Cisco Catalysts 3550-24.

>Any reason why you have
>to stick with Dense mode?
Probably because it's dont supports any others, like SM or SDM :-)
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WBR, Serhio

[Stuart Teo]

You said 50 source groups. I'll worry less about the switch running out of memory than the entire network being affected by high bandwidth streams. Initially, high bandwidth streams may "shut off" other applications.

[Sergey Yr Goncharov]

Of course, there'll be some inconveniences with dence mode. But the initial flows will be dropped on the first IGMP-snooping-enabled gigabit switch down from 5304, isn't it? According to our network load I don't think that this link will be a bottleneck, even to consider an initial flood.
By the way, how much time this flood will flow before the prune state will occur?
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WBR, Serhio.

[Stuart Teo]

The 5304 is the only PIM router right? In that case, it should be pretty quick to have a pruned tree.

[Sergey Yr Goncharov]

It's not only the PIM router, but the edge router, and it will be the same for the multicast traffic consumers.
So, how many time switch will wait for joins before to come to the pruning state? I cannot find it in the RTFM.
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WBR, Serhio.