QOS - Hardware Queue

Here i look at QOS starting from the ground up.

First for traffic in the outbound direction. Each interface has a hardware queue also known as the tx-ring or transmit ring. This is always serviced FIFO.

The size of this queue can be viewed

Router_1#show controllers fa0/0 | inc tx_lim
tx_limited=0(256)
In this example the default size is 256 packets. This can be adjusted. In this example i reduce the size to 50 packets.

config-if=tx-ring-limit 50

If the hardware queue becomes full then the output software queue is used for buffering traffic. When adjusting queueing mechanisms it is this logic for emptying this queue that is adjusted e.g. PQ,CBWFQ, CQ etc

The size of this queue can be seen using the standard show interface command. by default it has a size of 40 packets.

Router_1#show int fa0/0 | inc Output queue
Output queue: 0/40 (size/max)

The size of the queue can be adjusted using the following command

conf-if# hold-queue 20 out

N.B. The hold-queue size applies when default FIFO queueing is in use on the interface. When other queuing methods are in use this command does not apply and the software queue sizes are set by the relevant queuing commands.


Now Input queueing....

Packets in an inbound direction are immediately handled by the interface drivers, router cpu etc. If buffering is needed due to high throughput or router load then the input queue is used.

The size of this queue is 75 packets by default and this can be viewed using the show interface command.

Router_1#show int fa0/0 | inc Input queue
Input queue: 0/75/0/0 (size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 0

This can be adjusted as follows

config-if#hold-queue 20 in