ERROR: Total CPU Utilization is at 99% for the past 5 seconds, which is very high (>90%). This can cause the following symptoms: - Input queue drops - Slow performance - Slow response in Telnet or unable to Telnet to the router - Slow response on the console - Slow or no response to ping - Router doesn't send routing updates The following processes are causing excessive CPU usage: PID CPU Time Process 28 37.83% IP Input TRY THIS: If IP Input is consuming the CPU, one of the following might be the cause: - Fast switching is disabled on an interface (or interfaces) that has a lot of outgoing traffic. Examine the output of the 'show interfaces switching' command to see which interface is burdened with traffic. Re-enable fast switching on that interface. - TCP Intercept is enabled. TCP Intercept requires process switching for all packets during session set-up. - Fast switching is disabled on an interface which supports more than one network and is routing traffic between them. This can occur when an interface has one or more secondary network addresses configured. INFO: The router will process switch all packets sourced from the interface and destined to host(s) off the same interface which is a CPU-intensive task. Use the 'ip route-cache same-interface' interface configuration command to allow packets to be fast switched on the same interface. - Traffic that can't be fast switched is arriving. This could be any of the following types of traffic: * Packet for which there is no entry yet in the switching cache. INFO: If there is a device in the network which is generating lots of packets at an extremely high rate for devices reachable through the router and is using different source or destination ip addresses, there won't be a match for these packets in the switching cache, so they will be processed by the IP Input process. This source device can be a malfunctioning device or a device attempting a Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack. * Packets destined for the router (ie. Routing Updates or a Spoof Attack) * IP packets with options * Packets that require protocol translation * Multilink PPP * Packets that require policy routing. INFO: IOS versions 11.3 and higher allow policy-routed packets to be fast switched. Use the 'ip route-cache policy' interface configuration command to allow policy-routed packets to be fast switched. * Packets going through serial interfaces with X.25 encapsulation. In the X.25 protocol suite, flow control is implemented in layer 2 of the OSI model. * Compressed traffic. If there's no Compression Service Adapter (CSA) in the router, compressed packets must be process-switched. * Encrypted traffic. If there's no Encryption Service Adapter (ESA) in the router, encrypted packets must be process-switched. - A lot of packets, arriving at an extremely high rate, for a destination in a directly attached subnet, for which there is no entry in the ARP table. This shouldn't happen with TCP traffic, because of the windowing mechanism, but it can happen with UDP traffic. - A lot of multicast traffic going through the router. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to examine the amount of multicast traffic. If you've configured multicast routing on the router, you can enable fast switching of multicast packets using the 'ip mroute-cache' interface configuration command (fast switching of multicast packets is off by default). - A lot of broadcast traffic. Check the number of broadcast packets in the 'show interfaces' command output. - Too much traffic is passing through the router. If the router is over-used and is incapable of handling this amount of traffic, try distributing the load among other routers or consider purchasing a high-end router. - IP NAT is configured on the router and there are lots of DNS packets going through the router. UDP or TCP packets with source and/or destination port 53 (DNS) are always punted to process level by NAT. - Check who's logged on to the router and what they are doing. If someone is logged on and is issuing commands that produce long output, the high CPU utilization by the IP input process will be followed by a much higher CPU utilization by the virtual EXEC process.