View Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) Utilization on the 300 Series Managed Switches

Objective

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is used by the switch to store rules various applications such as Quality of Service (QoS), Access Control Lists (ACLs), IP route tables, and VLANs. The way TCAM stores these rules in memory is different than normal memory RAM storage, where the IOS uses a memory address to search for specific data. TACM instead, uses the data first and then it looks for the respective memory location. In this way the switch searches for these rules faster, which improves overall performance. The 300 Series Managed Switches can hold 512 rules. An enabled application can use up a small portion of the TCAM rules. Each rule entry for an application will use up 1 or 2 TCAM rules.

You can check the TCAM utilization on the 300 Series Managed Switches to look at the percentage of how much TCAM rules have been utilized. If you implement many applications on your switch, you need to make sure the switch does not consume all of the available TCAM rules. This article explains how to view TCAM utilization on the 300 Series Managed Switches.

Applicable Devices

• SF/SG 300 Series Managed Switches

Software Version

• v1.2.7.76

View TCAM Utilization

Step 1. Log in to the web configuration utility and choose Status and Statistics > TCAM Utilization. The TCAM Utilization page opens.

Note: The TCAM Utilization field displays the TCAM utilization as a percentage of the TCAM rules used out of the maximum 512 rules allowed.

Note: The Max TCAM Entries field displays the total amount of TCAM available entries.