Very High NAT Translationi Count

[Russell Stamey]

I have a customer with one particular site that is constantly complaining about performance.

They have a 871 at the remote location with 4 IPsec tunnels built over to WAN connections back to their vendor that host the database and software.

There are about 50 people that work at this location, but I am showing 3410 current connections with a peak of 14703. I don't see how this is possible with only 50 people and am starting to lean towards the NAT config that may be causing the poor performance the users are experiencing.

Auffen_Washington#show ip nat statistics
Total active translations: 3410 (0 static, 3410 dynamic; 3410 extended)
Peak translations: 14703, occurred 2d05h ago
Outside interfaces:
  FastEthernet4, Tunnel401, Tunnel0, Tunnel11, Vlan3, Tunnel101, Tunnel201
  Tunnel301
Inside interfaces:
  Vlan1, Vlan2
Hits: 574573468  Misses: 0
CEF Translated packets: 566630850, CEF Punted packets: 45186206
Expired translations: 10381404
Dynamic mappings:
-- Inside Source
[Id: 1] access-list NAT_Wireless_DMS interface Loopback1 refcount 0
[Id: 2] route-map NAT_Failover interface Vlan3 refcount 0
[Id: 3] route-map NAT_Primary interface FastEthernet4 refcount 3410
Appl doors: 0
Normal doors: 0
Queued Packets: 0
 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Russell Stamey

[Karsten Iwen]

With 50 users, I would say that 3400 translations (and connections) are quite normal.

At the moment I'm alone in the office with two Macs active:

Total active translations: 101 (0 static, 101 dynamic; 101 extended)

Now I start iTunes on one PC:

Total active translations: 160 (0 static, 160 dynamic; 160 extended)

Now I start Google Earth on the same PC:

Total active translations: 237 (0 static, 237 dynamic; 237 extended)

It all depends on the applications you are using. Many Apps open a lot of connections to speed up the transmission. That's more or less "normal" behavior.