Colin,
Hope you are doing fine, please find below my personal experience.
First of all I've seen performance boosts regarding VSX on newer versions compared to R77.30. I highly recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible.
Second, one of our customer had an outage in one of their deployments of VSX running R77.30, similar to yours but with pure tcp traffic (Only HTTPS was going through). The VS had 150k connections. Only way out was to perform a failover. After finishing the forensic we found that the cores associated with VS0 were way high together with other cores, also dynamic dispatcher is off by default in R77.30 and if I remember correctly there was a limitation with VSX.
In large deployments I like to assign 2 cores to VS0 itself, this is a recent screenshot of the CPU consumption of the cores assigned to VS0 in R80.30 (VSX cluster with 20 VS at the moment). Both cores are dedicated to VS0 only. There is not enough information on how much magic happens inside VS0 but I like to keep my management plane safe.
To make things worse, many VSX deployments don't have their CoreXL affinity tunned for each VS, so the saturation of one core may lead to serious repercussion in other VS. In certain enviroments this simply can't be done (IE: Having more VSs than cores). First advise would be to see if you can perform this, therefore each VS will have their dedicated cores.
Also I think that one fwk for a VS that is running 150k concurrent connections is not enough, especially if you are using other blades (IPS, etc)
Second advise, stated by Maarten, I can hardly stress how important is to use MultiQ, even more if you are using SFP ports. My guess here is that your SND cores were saturated with your DNS flood and had a hard time processing new packets. If using SFP for a 21400 I find best to do a 4/8 split (4 SND and 8 CoreXL), this way you can use 4 cores un MultiQ for SFP.
And again, upgrade to R80.30, VSX works like a charm on it.
Hope it helps,
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