Load balancing quirks
One of my readers has noted an interesting load-balancing behavior: when he was running traceroute tests from various routers in a topology similar to the one displayed below, the traceroute outputs indicated per-packet load balancing (both paths were used) when they were initiated from R2 or R3, but used a single path when initiated from R1 or R4.
The reason for this behavior is very simple: if you do traceroute from R1 to R4, R2 and R3 perform CEF switching, which usually does load balancing based on source-destination IP address pairs, so all probe packets from R1 to R4 travel along the same path. If you start traceroute from R2 or R3, the packets are process-switched on the first hop (from R2 to R3, for example) and thus alternate between the parallel links.
This article is part of You've asked for it series.
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3 comments:
Hi Ivan,
Could you please elaborate a little more on this. I thought with CEF switching even the first packet was CEF switched. I believe that was one of the advantages of cef over fast switching. Thanks.
Regarding above comment:
That's only when the packet is flowing through the router, and not originating or terminating on the router. In this case, R2 or R3 have to craft the actual traceroute packet, and in doing so its process switched -- and hence load-balanced across both links.
Nice post. For who's interested there is a good document CEF cef load balancing here
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps2033/prod_technical_reference09186a00800afeb7.html
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