Rikard,

It’s probably safe as long as you use a big enough value to cover “expected” 
traffic volumes, whatever that may be in your environment.

I only recently come across this command when investigating a situation where 
we saw all sorts of strange connectivity problems when trying to move some new 
traffic to a to a 6500/Sup720 on SXI.  Had to do a full compare of the configs 
on the working and non-working box to find “mls qos protocol arp police” 
configured to a number that was MUCH too low for the scenario.  No idea about 
the history as to why the command was ever added to the configuration.

“sh mls qos detailed” will show you packets getting dropped by the “mls qos 
protocol” commands,  but doesn’t break it down into different protocols.  Maybe 
you can start with a reassuringly large number, then bring it down while 
keeping an eye on the drops?  Needless to say, if you see 1000s of drops per 
minute like I did, you may have gone too far!

So while the command might be safe, I would question the usefulness of the 
command.  Without it, if there is a flood or ARPs you’ll suffer from high CPU – 
which might or might not be a problem depending on your exact setup and the 
volume of ARP traffic.  With it, a flood of ARPs will cause a random sampling 
of legitimate ARPs to be dropped which definitely will be a problem.

Cheers,
Ray

From: cisco-nsp [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Rikard 
Jacobsen
Sent: Thursday, 20 March 2014 12:05 a.m.
To: [email protected]
Subject: [c-nsp] rate-limit arp



Hi,

Anyone have a good config that rate-limit ARP packets? We are using Cisco 6500 
sup VS-S720-10G IOS version 12.2(33)SXJ2. Is it safe to use "mls qos protocol 
arp police xxx"? Recommended value for "xxx" bps?

Regards
Rikard
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