In EIGRP, what does a metric primarily depend on?

In Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), the metric used to determine the best path for routing primarily depends on bandwidth and delay. When EIGRP calculates its metric for a route, it employs a formula that combines both the bandwidth and delay characteristics of a link.

Bandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer across a network path, and delay pertains to the time it takes for a packet to travel from source to destination. By prioritizing these factors, EIGRP can more effectively choose the most efficient route for data packets, favoring paths that have higher bandwidth and lower delay.

In practice, this means that if a path has a higher bandwidth or a lower delay, EIGRP will consider it more favorable compared to other paths, effectively optimizing the routing process. This reliance on both bandwidth and delay allows EIGRP to provide a more comprehensive and performance-oriented metric compared to metrics that rely solely on other factors like hop count or purely network administrative properties.