Switch maximum throughput

[Vencola]

Hi everyone, 

can I know the throughput of the switches, I mean the whole throughput that the switch can process at a period of time, 

does it has a formula for example (sum the speed of all ports!) or it is has no relation to the port speed? 

This is the datasheet of 4500 series, https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-4500-x-series-switches/data_sheet_c78-696791.html , it says that the through put is 800G - is there another throughput for the routing, or all are the same. 

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also I need a way to measure that current used throughput on the whole switch, as for example PRTG gives me the usage for each port, not the whole switch, is there any tools / commands that gets me the total BW utilization of the switch. 

Thanks and best regards. 

[Leo Laohoo]

That depends on the model of each switch. 

For chassis-based systems like Catalyst 4k, 6k, 9400 and 9600 it will also be dependent on the model of the line card.

https://people.ucsc.edu/~warner/buffer.html

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Modern L3 switches L3 and L2 throughput are often the same, although on some switches, certain "corner cases" and/or exhaustion of some hardware resources will impact capacity (sometimes by a very huge amount).

Yes, you can often calculate the maximum capacity of a switch, but it can, sometimes, be difficult to calculate as so very much depends on the hardware and other factors.  Again, certain "corner cases", or certain feature usage, can also impact maximum possible throughput.

Sorry, I don't know of a tool which will provide the "total" BW utilization of the switch, but such a "number" wouldn't often mean much, as there are other considerations to how well a switch works rather than its bandwidth capacity (port buffer resources being one example).