Cisco 2960x High CPU usage when transferring firmware

Question

I am trying to transfer a new .bin file to a Cisco 2960x switch. Whenever I do this the CPU spikes to 100% and the maximum transfer rate is 35KB/s. A 28MB file takes 15 min+.

I've tried the following:

1. Try on 3 different switches, including an idle switch on my bench.
2. Try a different model of 2960x.
3. Try different firmware versions, including the recommend 15.2(7)E7.
4. Clear the config and only set an IP address on the switch.
5. Try with SCP, TFTP, and HTTP.
6. Use different computers and software to transfer the file from.
7. Plug directly in to the switch.

Whenever the transfer starts, I can see with show proc cpu history that the CPU is spiked to 99%.

If I use show proc cpu sort | ex 0.00 I see ssh using all available free cycles when using SCP, and I see exec maxed out when trying to use HTTP. I did not look at what process tftp uses.

This almost appears to be expected behavior. I'm at a loss. Can someone confirm, and/or point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

This is perfectly normal for Cisco switches of this class, including the very sluggish transfer rates when writing to flash. Nothing to worry about.

Nevermind the peaks or sustained load you can see in show proc cpu ... : The switch doesn't do the heavy lifting (in extenso: forwarding traffic from port to port) on the CPU you see reported there (or in SNMP for that matter) - it's got ASICS for that purpose.