Re: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

[Travis Pugh <tpugh () shore net>]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 02, 2001, Travis Pugh wrote:
> > Not to oversimplify, but assuming we can continue to separate forwarding
> > from the routing process itself, is this really a situation that calls for
> > a complete redesign of BGP?  If you look at the routing processors on
> > Cisco and Juniper hardware, Cisco's GSR is using a 200Mhz MIPS RISC
> > processor and Juniper is using a 333Mhz Mobile Pentium II.
> >
> > With RISC reaching 1Ghz and Intel pushing 2Ghz, it appears that the actual
> > processors in use by the 2 big vendors are a couple of years behind.  What
> > happens to the boxes ability to process a 500,000 route table if you
> > quadruple it's memory and give it 5 times more processing power?
> >
> > Also, it would likely require a re-write of software, but what's keeping
> > us from using SMP in routers?
>
> Performance of a routing protocol is not a function of just
> the CPU avaliable.
>
> Performance of a routing protocol is a function of the CPU
> avaliable and the network characteristics.

Granted, but are you saying that the 15 minutes it takes one of my BGP
sessions to reload has no relevance to the crusty, old processor doing
route calculations on 104,000 routes?  Multiply the CPU available by 5,
and then look for bottlenecks.  Seems sane to me.  Also seems a hell of a
lot easier than trying to redesign the network characteristics in 1 year
and implement them ... IPv6 anyone?

-travis

> *shakes head* people keep forgetting this. Do you guys also
> think you can solve the internets problems by adding more bandwidth?
>
>
>
> Adrian
>
> --
> Adrian Chadd          "The fact you can download a 100 megabyte file
> <adrian () creative net au>  from half way around the world should be viewed
>                           as an accident and not a right."
>                                       -- Adrian Chadd and Bill Fumerola