nanog mailing list archives
Re: number of hops != performance
From: Gary Coates <gary () newnet co uk>
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 17:32:09 +0000
In a commercial sense hops are seen as bad, points of failure(?) or 'distance from the middle of the internet'?. Who knows
Traceroutes aren't great at seeing whats REALLY going on.I suspect if everyone removed all their 'hop hiding' technology traceroutes would be at least 60% longer, the latency would remain the same.
Commercial sense doesn't have to make sense... If its what your competitors use to sell service, Hide your hops ;-)
G Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
We have competitors that are claiming that their network is superior to ours (salesdroids to customers) because they have fewer L3 hops in theirnetwork. I see this "fact" pop up in customer questions all the time.I can see that L3 hops adds latency if a network is built on slow (2meg for instance) links, but at gigabit speeds, L3 hops adds microseconds in latency (if you use equipment that forward using hardware-assisted forwarding, but as far as I know there are no routers out there nowadays that doesnt). Does anyone have a nice reference I can point to to once and for all state that just because a customer has 6-8 L3 hops within our network (all at gigabit speeds or higher) that doesnt automatically mean they are getting bad performance or higher latency. Hiding the L3 hops in a MPLS core (or other L2 switching) doesnt meancustomers are getting better performance since equipment today forwards just as quickly on L3 as on L2.
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Current thread:
- number of hops != performance Mikael Abrahamsson (Nov 05)
- Re: number of hops != performance Gary Coates (Nov 05)
- Re: number of hops != performance Richard A Steenbergen (Nov 05)
- Re: number of hops != performance Petri Helenius (Nov 05)
- Re: number of hops != performance Mikael Abrahamsson (Nov 05)
- Re: number of hops != performance Petri Helenius (Nov 05)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: number of hops != performance Michael . Dillon (Nov 05)