NimbostratusWe are looking to get the most life out of our 6400's. In trending CPU usage using tmstat we see CPU around 55% - 60% during the business day.
We have plans to go to v10 but I wanted to know what a good top level benchmark is for CPU on the 6400 runing v9.x? I know it can use 100% but at what CPU level do you start seeing performance issue?
Knowing this will help in planning discussions and hopefully move the upgrade to v10 along quicker.
Cirrostratus
On a 6400 running 9.x, CPU0 will be used for host processes and CPU1 will be dedicated to TMM. I'd be concerned if peaks in traffic started regularly using 75% of CPU1. I expect increased latency at 85-95% CPU utilization. If CPU0 gets up to 95-100% CPU utilization for realtime (not "niced") processes, you could see bigd failing to perform monitor checks and pool members flapping. This will have an impact on load balanced traffic as users get bounced around pool members.
At 85 - 95% memory utilization, TMM will start reaping old connections:
sol5670: Overview of adaptive connection reaping
http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/5000/600/sol5670.html
In v10, if your config is CMP compatible, TMM will run on both CPUs. You'll have more load balancing capacity than on v9 using one CPU.
http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/default.aspx/iRules/CMPCompatibility.html
Aaron