Am I wasting bandwidth with an unused priority queue?

[kevin_miller]

Building a single policy-map that works for all my remotes is my goal. However, I have some remotes that don't run VoIP, for example. If I use a policy-map at these sites that creates a 20% strict priority queue for VoIP, am I essentially "losing" that 20% - or if the queue is unused can the 20% be utilized by traffic in other non-priority queues? Are there any other penalties for having an unused priority queue that I'm missing?

[Collin Clark]

The queueing will only happen when the tx ring gets full, otherwise any application can use it. Having the queue there, the tx ring full and no traffic in the queue will affect it. The queue will be reserved for the traffic defined in your class-map set as priority.

Hope that helps.

[Joseph W. Doherty · Accepted solution]

If I use a policy-map at these sites that creates a 20% strict priority queue for VoIP, am I essentially "losing" that 20% (no) - or if the queue is unused can the 20% be utilized by traffic in other non-priority queues? (yes) Are there any other penalties for having an unused priority queue that I'm missing? (yes - you won't be able to "reserve" that amount of bandwidth for other class traffic - if you think of bandwidth management in ratios, this usually isn't a problem)

[kevin_miller]

That's exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks very much.