Category: ARP

Under some circumstances, you might want to tune the ARP timers on the router (for example, when using ARP as a keepalive mechanism to detect whether the host is up). Unfortunately, although you can set the per-interface arp timeout in seconds, the actual timer resolution is in minutes. For example, if you set the ARP timeout to 10 seconds, the router will age the ARP entries once per minute.

In a previous post I've been writing about the inability to clean the ARP cache due to cached CEF adjacencies. As it turns out, this behavior has another side effect: the router will automatically refresh all ARP entries (and CEF adjacencies) as they expire from the ARP cache. This might become a problem on high-end devices with a lot of directly connected hosts if you set the arp timeout to a low value.

Whenever a router running CEF switching has LAN interfaces (or any other multi-access interfaces), you'll find cached adjacencies for active directly attached IP neighbors in its CEF table. These adjacencies ensure the smooth traffic flow toward the LAN-attached next-hops (preventing the initial packet drop symptom once the next-hop becomes active).