Subject: Comments to draft benchmarking methodology

From: Debby Stopp <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 11:21:29 -0700

I have some initial comments regarding the draft-ieft-bmwg-mswitch-00.txt.
First, it's interesting that there's absolutely no mention of gigabit in 
any of the text.  Are we assuming that these tests are valid for any 
ethernet interface (ie, 10/100 or gig), or are we making the assumption 
that there will be an additional bmwg document describing methodologies for 
verifying gigabit switches?
Is the objective of this draft document to provide a methodology to 
adequately stess test LAN switching devices, or is this merely a forum for 
Netcom to publish their existing algorithms as industry standards?  It 
appears as if this methodology directly describes the Netcom current 
implementation of their AST test.
For example, from section 5.1:
>Each port in the test sends frames to all other ports in a round- robin 
type fashion. The following table shows how each >port in a test SHOULD 
transmit frames to all other ports in the test. In this example, there are 
six ports with 1 address >per port: <snip>
While I view this as one way of performing the fully-meshed traffic loading 
methodology, I believe there are other equally as valid algorithms that 
will better represent real-world traffic scenarios.  A symetrical 
round-robin distribution is not in any way representative of the kinds of 
traffic a heavily loaded switch may encounter on a real network.
>From section 5.9:
The algorithms listed for address cache capacity appears to be a cut & 
paste directly from the Netcom Advanced Switch Test User's Guide.  While 
this is an interesting approach, I believe that more discussion is 
warranted.

Debby Stopp
Ixia Communications - http://www.ixiacom.com/
[email-masked]