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Excessive broadcast traffic patterns

xylofi
Level 1
Level 1

Can anyone enlighten me on how hosts deal with excessive broadcast traffic? Do they all deal with them differently? From desktop PCs, laptops, servers, IoT devices etc. My understanding is that hosts will be interrupted to process these requests, so if they're getting a lot of them what's the impact? Do the size of these requests make any difference to the end host?

If we're seeing large amounts of input/out discards, is this an indication that the switch buffers are being filled and not processed in a timely fashion, so it's having to discard them?

Thank you.

 

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

There are several problems with broadcasts.  First, unlike not flooded unicast or IGMP controlled multicast, every broadcasts is transmitted down/out every port (if same broadcast domain).  I.e. much LAN traffic, other than broadcast traffic, is never presented to the host's NIC.

Second, NICs are designed to quickly ignore frames of no interest, but with broadcasts, the host must accept and analyze the contents to determine whether it's of interest to the host or not.  I.e. undesired broadcast place a much higher burden on the host than other undesired traffic.

The impact is the host's NIC and other system components need to spend their time ignoring undesired broadcasts whose time would be better employed, productively, for other purposes.

As to "size", that shouldn't matter too much beyond taking up buffer space until the host can decide it can discard them.  I.e. larger sizes, likely, do not increase resource consumption, again beyond buffer space usage.

Hard to say what your input/out discards represent, but yes, lots of broadcasts might impact one or both.

BTW, don't forget, network devices, with network management access, are also hosts.  I.e. a network device's management "port" exposed to broadcasts can impact the device's overall performance.

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4 Replies 4

Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

There are several problems with broadcasts.  First, unlike not flooded unicast or IGMP controlled multicast, every broadcasts is transmitted down/out every port (if same broadcast domain).  I.e. much LAN traffic, other than broadcast traffic, is never presented to the host's NIC.

Second, NICs are designed to quickly ignore frames of no interest, but with broadcasts, the host must accept and analyze the contents to determine whether it's of interest to the host or not.  I.e. undesired broadcast place a much higher burden on the host than other undesired traffic.

The impact is the host's NIC and other system components need to spend their time ignoring undesired broadcasts whose time would be better employed, productively, for other purposes.

As to "size", that shouldn't matter too much beyond taking up buffer space until the host can decide it can discard them.  I.e. larger sizes, likely, do not increase resource consumption, again beyond buffer space usage.

Hard to say what your input/out discards represent, but yes, lots of broadcasts might impact one or both.

BTW, don't forget, network devices, with network management access, are also hosts.  I.e. a network device's management "port" exposed to broadcasts can impact the device's overall performance.

Hey Joseph,
Thanks for your input once again.
Do you mind clarifying what you are referring to when you say buffer space. Is this the memory that switch ports use to store unprocessed frames/packets? Do you have any more information about how this works? How much can they store? 

Thank you.

Buffer space is RAM used to store ingress frames/packets until they are transmitted.

How much can be stored depends on physical RAM and how buffer space might be "reserved" for specific usage.

If we're seeing large amounts of input/out discards, is this an indication that the switch buffers are being filled and not processed in a timely fashion, so it's having to discard them?

Please I need more elaborate about this point 

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