ARP tables in FreeBSD (vs Linux)

[Chuck Swiger]

On May 27, 2011, at 3:31 PM, Rogelio wrote:
> It was one of those things where in an effort to quickly fix things, I
> split up the collision domain and used a router to handle the ARP.
> 
> Right now, a 7201 router has about 15K ARPs, and the system is much slower.

I'm not surprised.  Even good switches tend to have max ARP table sizes of 4000 of 8000 entries; your 7201 or the Linux gateway previously might be encountering slowdowns because the switches are constantly needing to relearn ARP table entries which have been dropped.

Anyway, regardless of your router platform, it's not a preferable situation to put thousands of MACs into a single collision domain, much less tens of thousands.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck