Cisco Systems Cisco Systems This document describes an alternative to "Benchmarking Methodology for Network Interconnect Devices" (RFC 2544) throughput by defining a new methodology called Multiple Loss Ratio search (MLRsearch). MLRsearch aims to minimize search duration, support multiple loss ratio searches, and improve result repeatability and comparability. MLRsearch is motivated by the pressing need to address the challenges of evaluating and testing the various data plane solutions, especially in software-based networking systems based on Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) CPU hardware vs purpose-built ASIC / NPU / FPGA hardware.