Pages

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Show run/copy run start on Cisco takes forever?

Are you frustrated that "Show run", "Show run interface <something>, "write mem" or "copy run start" is taking forever on Cisco routers or switches? Rest assure that you are not alone, there are many of us who feel your pain. It even takes longer to return these results on a system containing numerous lines in the running configuration. Why? Because the NVGEN process needs to query everything about your router and then output these results. It's painstakingly long especially when you are in the middle of troubleshooting something. 30 seconds may as well be 30 years. Not to mention that it almost results in a CPU spike sending false alerts everywhere and to everyone. To return the results of the aforementioned commands much faster enable the configuration performance enhancement by typing "parser config cache interface" in the global config mode.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Understanding TCP Window Size / Window Scaling

The easiest way to understand TCP Window size is to observe two people having a conversation. Every so often, the talker will wait for the listener to acknowledge that they have heard everything up to that point. Once the listener acknowledges then the talker begins to talk again. The amount of words spoken before waiting for an acknowledgement from the listener is much like the TCP window size. The official definition of the window size is "the amount of octets that can be transmitted without receiving an acknowledgement from the other side".