HIGH CPU Utilization on Catalyst 6504

[Andrew Hernandez]

Greetings,

I would love is someone could point me in the right direction on my issue.  Our 6500 series switch is just not happy right now, there are no service interruptions due to this, just a very sluggish switch.  I feel if this keeps going then I'll be seeing others issues later on.  I attached my current config and cpu utilization on the chassis.  I would call up TAC, but this is one switch we didn't put under contract.  Articles, cases or similar issues you can forward over or advice you can give would be helpful.  At the moment I'm throwing up a Cacti server, not for this issue, but just cause I'm used to having one on the network and from here on will keep a close eye on everything.  

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Andrew

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Andrew

Your IP input process is high and this suggests a lot of process switched traffic which means the traffic is sent to the CPU for forwarding as opposed to being hardware switched.

Looking at your configuration the one thing that really stands out is the multicast configuration and this may (only may) be the cause.

The only other noticeable thing is the SPAN session which can cause issues with TCAM resources.

But I would be looking at the multicast traffic first.

Have a look at this link which has advice as to how to narrow down what the cause is -

https://supportforums.cisco.com/document/59926/troubleshooting-high-cpu-6500-sup720

you may need to use the "netdr" command to see what traffic is being process switched.

Jon