I have a Catalyst 2900 that's sending out an STP packet about once ever 1-2 seconds. Is that excessive?
2 Answers
Is that excessive?
In short: No.
You can start getting worried once you start seeing ARP request frequencies three or four orders of magnitude more than that.
As an aside, your screenshot does not show ARP packets. It shows STP packets, which perform a completely different task.
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lol sorry, I meant to put STP. So it's not excessive to see STP packets once a second from a switch?– blsub6Oct 21, 2010 at 20:48
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Nope - the switch uses those for loop detection, so they're completely normal.– EEAAOct 21, 2010 at 21:08
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You should be happy that it checks this every second, it keeps your network safe from burning up.– pauskaOct 21, 2010 at 21:13
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1Would like to add that it is called the Spamming Tree Protocol for a reason :-)– 3moloMar 31, 2012 at 10:39
The default STP hello time for STP root bridge is normally 2 seconds, so this looks pretty normal to me. The hello time is the interval at which the root bridge sends an STP BPDU onto the network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPDU#Bridge_Protocol_Data_Units_.28BPDUs.29