High CPU Load on DHCP Servers
Date Posted: January 01, 2008 04:48 PM
Author: Mel Beckman
Dear Doctor, We recently extended our campus LAN to several new buildings with hundreds of new users. To limit the range of network broadcasts and potential broadcast storms, we've followed the recommended practice of segmenting the network into multiple IP subnets using layer-3 switches. However, we have only two DHCP servers for the entire network, a primary and a backup, to avoid replicating the DHCP hardware on every subnet. We use DHCP Helper addresses in the switch VLAN configurations to forward DHCP requests from each subnet to the DHCP servers. As we add new subnets, we've notice the CPU load on the DHCP servers is steadily climbing. It's alarmingly at about 80 percent, and we've added only half of the users. A sniffer analysis shows a great deal of UDP traffic redirected by the switches. This seems surprising, as I never considered DHCP a very high-traffic protocol. What can we do to ameliorate this?

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