WAN throughput on a 2801

[angel-moon]

Can someon confirm this? I have been informed that the total WAN throughput on a 2801 is 1.5 Mbps no matter if the connection is coming through the ethernet port, a serial port or whatever? I thought it was much higher than that.

Thanks in advance! All replies rated!

[Jon Marshall]

Angel

1.5Mbps is for process switched packets. For fast switched/CEF the figure is 61Mbps. See attached pdf.

Jon

[Joseph W. Doherty]

BTW, Jon quoted performance for a 2811.

The 2801 is a little slower at about 46 Mbps for CEF.

Also keep in mind, you often need to allow for duplex traffic, i.e. 46 Mbps would be 23 Mbps for duplex.

Further, you want to avoid running the router at 100%, so you might want to divide the perforamance in half or more.

I.e., 2801 might well "safely" handle about 10 Mbps (duplex).

PS:

NB: There are other differences between the 2800 models. A visible one is module slots. Not so visible, might be subtle ones, such as 2801 doesn't (I believe) support Etherchannel across its ports, but the other 2800 series models do.

[Collin Clark]

Don't listen to that person anymore :-). I've attached a performance guide that shows what each router can do. You will notice if you process switch it is 1.5Mbps, but you should run CEF unless you have a specific reason.

Hope that helps.

[angel-moon]

Thanks guys. They person that informed us of that was in Cisco Pre-sales! Maybe he was trying to bump us up a notch

[firstclick168]

In this case, If I have 100mbps link connect to my cisco 2801 router, when it run cisco IPSEC VPN, the maximum throughput between 2 location only can get about 3mbps? or perhaps cisco got another data sheet for us as references?

[jpnorth33012]

This thread is super old, but if anyone is curious about some real world usage, I have two 2801s in my lab.  In a simple config with only routing with NAT overload (PAT), I achieve about 90mbps throughput in a speedtest at 80% CPU usage on a ISR 2801 running IOS 15.1.  I have a 1gbps connection, so it's definitely the ISR that's the bottleneck.  If you throw ANY services at this router, it will definitely tank the speeds.  I'd be surprised if in a real office environment you see anything beyond 50mbps with this unit.

To put this in perspective, I also have a 2921 and a 1921 in my lab, and the 2921 pushes over 250mbps at about 70%, and the 1921 isn't far behind it (surprisingly punchy for such a small device).  We have several ISR 4331s in production at work, and with the performance license, they hit the 300mbps performance limit at about 3% CPU, allowing for tons of features to be enabled.

The 2801 is a solid router and will probably outlive a lot of pieces of equipment out there.  But if you're still using one in a production network, you should probably replace it.  If nothing else, because the IOS is getting old and probably has some security flaws.

Cheers.