STP is a #202206131651 protocol designed to run on 202207051851# and 202207051907# in order to prevent #202207081644 inside the network. It has been standardised by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) with 802.1d.
The mechanism behind it is to activate only one network path at a time and allow several standby paths, which by default will be blocked, and brought up one of them when the activated network link is down. The protocol will maintain a 202207081445#, which includes all the switches in the 202207051554, using bridge protocol data units (BPDU) to exchange information between the switches. All switches in the spanning tree will elect a root switch to become the focal pointer for the network by selecting the one with the smallest ID (though the network administrator can arbitrarily dedicate a root switch).
According to the rules defined in 802.1d, all ports on the root switch must be in a forwarding state. Others will determine whether the port is the closest to the root (determining root port), and decide to put it in a forwarding state. If nonroot switches occupy a common network segment, they must negotiate with each other to decide who has the shortest path to the root (designated port) and put it in a forwarding state. All other ports for the nonroot switches that connected to other switch or bridge will be in blocking state. After that, the switches will periodically send out a BPDU to indicate that they are still alive.
When a port first become active, it will not be put immediately into forwarding state to avoid causing the network loop. According to 802.1d, it will go through 3 states sequentially: listening (the switch transmits and receives BPDUs to determine the state of the spanning tree), learning (continue listening, plus receives traffic and begins building a bridge table based on the source MAC addresses of the traffic), and forwarding. The first two stages take 15 seconds each by default, which is 30 seconds in total. To speed it up, try 202207122007# instead.
Since each 202207061741# on a switch had to have its own root, it scales real bad with switches with a lot of VLANs. The alternative of it is 202207122011#.