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The switches being good at ARP and bad at an alternative isn't down to technical merits, it's down to which one existed first.

And it sounds like turning the intelligent feature off and treating the packets as pure broadcast, just like ARP packets, would have fixed the problem. If the switch can't do that in the right way, it's not the protocol's fault.

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Yup, turning off snooping would have fixed the issue at hand but not the poor choice of relying on STP for redundancy.

I've seen this happen a few times in my life in production systems, designed by someone else. Overload a switch somehow and it goes straight in ludacris mode because of the topology. Properly configured networks suffer minor outages only in case of single device meltdowns.

It seems like it took multiple switches melting down from bad software design to cause the problems. I originally had a line about the risk of large broadcast domains but the comments on the post claim they were actually pretty small.

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