Multicast scalability

[deanyoung]

Hi,

I am running a network comprising of Catalyst 6513's with SUP7203B's. at present we have 800 VLAN's as we make use of a VLAN per access layer switch model.

I know have a problem that as soon as I enable multicast routing my SUP720's CPU runs at 100% and the system goes into a slowdown.

I would like to knwo where I can find information on the scalability of Multicast?

Regards

Dean

[Keith Wood]

Not to resurrect a dead thread, but we're having this same issue on several 6500's. We keep getting:

%MCAST-SP-4-MET_THRESHOLD_EXCEEDED: Multicast Expansion table has exceeded 98% of its capacity and is reaching its maximum

We have CEF enabled, PIM in sparce mode and an RP manually set.

(hostname omitted)#show platform hardware capacity multicast

L3 Multicast Resources

  IPv4 replication mode: egress

  IPv6 replication mode: egress

  Bi-directional PIM Designated Forwarder Table usage: 4 total, 0 (0%) used

  Replication capability: Module                              IPv4        IPv6

                          1                                 egress      egress

                          2                                 egress      egress

                          3                                 egress      egress

                          4                                 egress      egress

                          5                                 egress      egress

                          6                                 egress      egress

                          7                                 egress      egress

                          8                                 egress      egress

  MET table Entries: Module                             Total    Used    %Used

                     5                                  65516   65340     100%

                     6                                  65516       0       0%

Multicast LTL Resources

  Usage:   30656 Total, 1174 Used

I have read several threads and have not seen a solution to this. I guess the only difference we have from the original post is that CPU usage is not high. We had CEF off at one point and the IP Input was causing CPU to be high (understanably), but upon turning CEF back on it normalized. Thoughts?