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Sunday, July 1, 2018

Jitter timer in HSRP Protocol

 Jitter timers HSRP Protocol

Jitter timers are used in HSRP. They are recommended for timers running on services that work realtime and scale. Jitter timers are intended to significantly improve the reliability of HSRP, and other FHRP protocols, by reducing the chance of bunching of HSRP groups operations, and thus help reduce CPU and network traffic spikes. In the case of HSRP, a given device may have up to 4000 operational groups configured. In order to distribute the load on the device and network, the HSRP timers use a jitter. A given timer instance may take up to 20% more than the configured value. For example, for a hold time set to 15 seconds, the actual hold time may take 18 seconds.

In HSRP, the Hello timer (which sends the Hello Packet) has a negative Jitter, while the Holddown timer (which checks for failure of a peer) has a positive jitter.