I have some questions about ARP caching works in 2.4. According to the manpage, ARP garbage collection does not occur unless there are "gc_thres1" entries. But "gc_thres1" is by default 128, and I know on small networks that ARP entries do age out. How does the aging of stale entries work vs. garbage collection? "gc_stale_time" is also a little confusing. The manpage says, "Determines how often to check for stale neighbour entries", but the other postings that I've read indicate that "gc_stale_time" is an inactivity timer for ARP entries, not a scanning interval to look for stale entries. I also don't understand what values affect <incomplete> entries. They seem to be aged out very quickly. Do the incomplete entries act as an ARP negative cache? My goal is try to reduce ARP traffic on a Linux box acting as router. The box has a number of NIC cards, and number of subnets on each interface. The ARP table usually has around 3,800 entries. I've increased gc_thres1 to 4000, gc_thres2 to 4500, and gc_thres3 to 5000. I'm not sure what else I can do. Tom - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
