Remark statements and named ACLs on 7206

[ghenning]

We have a 7206 with early code that can't use the compiled ACLs for reasons too political to go into here. My questions are:

1) do remark statements expend any significant CPU time? The ACLs are heavily remarked, and we are wondering if pulling those remark statements would improve performance?

2) is there any practical difference between named ACLs and numbered ACLs? Does IOS process them any differently where one may be more efficient than the other?

Thanks.

[Richard Burts]

Gary

I am pretty sure (but not authoritative) that remarks in the access list do not impact performance. I believe that in operation the router only looks at the permit and deny statements. When you do a show access-list command which looks at what the access lists are actually doing you do not see the remarks. I do not think that you would see any difference in performance if you removed the remarks (and the impact on maintainability of the access lists would be large).

It is my understanding that in terms of processing numbered access lists and named access lists are processed the same. I do not believe that there is any efficiency difference in them. I seem to remember that a couple of features that use access lists have some restriction about named or numbered, but I believe that reflects differences in the feature code not any functional difference in type of access list.

HTH

Rick