Rate-Limiting - When to not restrict

[stauftm]

Hey all, long time no talk. I hope everyone is doing well. I have a quick post on rate-limiting. There has been plenty of discussion on best practices with it, and for me on all my edge switches 470's, 55xx, etc I limit both to 5% for broadcast and multicast. One thing I've never really run across is are there scenarios that anyone is willing to share that you actually had to not set the rate-limiting, or raise the value?

Thanks!

[Michael McNamara]

If you had a lot of Multicast applications/traffic then you might need to be careful of what value you select.

The design guidelines will instruct you to start at 10% and work your way down from there in order to find a comfortable value that works in your specific network. I personally use 5% for all my switches (and ports) and have yet to encounter a need to modify that value. With that said though I only have a few Multicast applications and even those are geographically based and isolated to the LAN at each site (there's no Multicast in the WAN).

Again depending on your specific network you might want to just rate-limit edge ports and not the trunks (uplinks/downlinks) between your network switches.

Good Luck!