Configuring the MAC Table Timeout Interval

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The MAC table aging process ensures that a router tracks only active MAC addresses on the network and is able to flush out address that are no longer used.

You can configure the MAC table aging time, the maximum time that an entry can remain in the MAC table before it “ages out,” on all bridge domains, one or all VPLS instances, or one or all Ethernet virtual private network (EVPNs) instances on the router. This configuration can influence efficiency of network resource use by affecting the amount of traffic that is flooded to all interfaces because when traffic is received for MAC addresses no longer in the Ethernet routing table, the router floods the traffic to all interfaces.

Depending on how long you want to keep a MAC address in a MAC table before it expires, you can either increase or decrease the aging timer. By default, the timeout interval for all entries in the MAC table is 300 seconds. You can modify the timeout interval for MAC table entries on an MX Series router. You cannot modify the timeout interval for a virtual switch.

Note:

The timeout interval applies only to dynamically learned MAC addresses. This value does not apply to configured static MAC addresses, which never time out.

The range for seconds is from 10 through 1,000,000.

You can modify the timeout interval for a router(at the global level) or on a per-domain basis (bridge domain).

To modify the timeout interval for the MAC table for a router:
```
[edit protocols l2-learning]
user@host# set global-mac-table-aging-time time;
```

To modify the timeout interval for a bridge domain:

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[edit bridge-domain bridge-domain-name bridge-options];
user@host# set mac-table-aging-time time;

To modify the timeout for a VPLS or an Ethernet virtual private network (EVPN) instance within a bridge domain:

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[edit routing-instance routing-instance-name protocols vpls];
[edit routing-instance routing-instance-name protocols evpn];
user@host# set mac-table-aging-time time;

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