On May 28, 2019, at 10:17 PM, Philippe Girard <phili...@skyhook.ca> wrote:
> 
> I've asked all of those questions but I can't seem to get a clear answer.

One additional question: what is upstream from the 1g interface that's showing 
drops?  Is it 10g (or larger)?

We have several small buildings that we're feeding 1g to from an EX4200-24F.  
However, the uplink to our core is 10g, so there's a speed mismatch in terms of 
how fast packets can arrive in the distribution switch versus how fast they can 
drain.  We'll frequently see tail drops on egress when a burst of packets come 
in until TCP does its thing and the bandwidth levels out.

If you look at the bandwidth graphs, we're rarely over a hundred Mb/s, so it 
looks like the interface isn't maxing out.  However, the packets arrive much 
more quickly than they can leave, so there's a bottleneck there.

There really isn't any clever way around it; I think those switches have 12MB 
of buffer (or is that the QFX?).  Anyway, if you do the math you quickly find 
out that works out to like 10ms of traffic, so the switch simply can't buffer 
even short amounts of mismatched speed traffic no matter what you do with the 
buffers.  And at 10ms, most monitoring software simply doesn't have the 
resolution to catch those bursts.

As you noted, the end user often doesn't notice.  However, it might help 
explain how you're seeing loss even at low rates, yet that don't appear to 
adversely affect traffic.

Jason
_______________________________________________
juniper-nsp mailing list juniper-nsp@puck.nether.net
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/juniper-nsp

Reply via email to