Is there a way to measure RIP advertisement traffic?

[tgrogan798]

We are having bad network performance and I am trying to determine if it is because we're still using RIPv2. We have all Cisco equipment and there is no real reason we haven't moved to EIGRP, but the net admin doesn't want to. So I am trying to find out for sure if it's what's causing the latency, timeout issues we frequently face and convince them to let me change it to EIGRP or maybe even OSPF.

Topology:

1 core 6509-V-E switch

7 distribution 3750 switches

I don't have an exact number on subnets but the routing tables are showing between 83 to 103 subnets in the routing tables. From what I can tell it lists the directly connected routes twice, once using the classful mask, another time with using the subnetted mask.

The RIP advertisements are set to go across the VLAN interfaces, of which some VLANs connect over the same physical interface. So the core switch shows routing information sources from the same gateways multiple times.

Here's what it looks like:

Routing Information Sources:

    Gateway         Distance      Last Update

    192.168.1.2          120      00:00:15

    129.168.1.2          120      00:00:12

    192.168.1.2          120      00:00:24

    192.168.26.2        120      00:00:05

    192.168.56.2.       120      11w5d

    192.168.56.3        120      2w1d

    192.168.57.10      120      00:00:17

    192.168.67.2        120      00:00:05

    192.168.67.2        120      00:00:24

    192.168.67.2        120      00:00:04

    192.168.127.2      120      00:00:09

The CPU and memory utilization is low, 9% and 18% respectively. But it shows nearly 40,000 transmit discards today.

Any opinions on whether RIP is to blame or how I can know for certain? Thanks.

[matthew-frederick]

What kind of performance issues are you having?

Are clients complaining that their network is slow?

Have you been running speed tests and seeing degredation in your speeds?

Or is it intermittent drops and things like that?

If your CPU usage is that low - I wouldn't look at the core switch having too much routing going on in the background as an issue.

On my network performance monitors - I really don't pay attention to discards - just errors. But, our network is much, much larger than that and discards are the least of my worries

I also have run EIGRP since day one - so I don't have much experience with RIP other than lab environments.

[Richard Burts]

With approximately 100 subnets in the routing table I would not think that routing updates were the cause of your problem. On the other hand RIPv2 is stll sending periodic advertisements of the entire table. So if you are seeing some spikey behaviors it could possibly be your routing protocol updates. Either EIGRP or OSPF would offer advantages in terms of lowering the amount of traffic generated by routing protocol updates.

HTH

Rick