Seems CTF has a bit of a voracious appetite for memory. Switched back to SFE and OOM (Out Of Memory) messages vanished.
Recabled some of the switches around adding in a Cisco SG200-08 for home traffic and that helped a bit too with the load / SIRQ problem on the routers. Appears response suffered slightly for external traffic, internal traffic response time is < 1ms vs < 5ms or higher when main switch is loaded.
Cheers,
Tom _________________ Cheers, TK
------------------------
After more tweaking and troubleshooting, partly via another thread below, finally figured out why things were happening, hower not at the root cause entirely from a TCP stack standpoint. Still hoping to find a better way to trace the issues from a software layer to help indicate why the non working topology blew things up.
Still other questions, like why does SFE affect DNS, remain unanswered. Summarized here: