Re: Regarding global BGP community values

[Vadim Antonov <avg () kotovnik com>]

Aw, Tony, you're talking to a guy who made his name
programming discrete transistor computers with core
memory (i mean _real_ core memory, and real germanium
transistors :)

I bet he knows more than anyone else in this list about
squeezing bits :)

Cheers,

--vadim

PS  Old-timers are entitled to being grumpy about how
    wasteful the modern computing is.  After all, how do you
    feel about operating systems which just have to have
    at least 30 Mb of RAM to be useful? :)


From: Tony Li <tony1 () home net>

"Alex P. Rudnev" wrote:

> The growth itself do not cause the problems, but in conjunction with the
> poor router implementation (which cause 60,000 routes to use 30 MB of the
> RAM - that means 500 bytes for every prefix -:) and numerous memory leaks
> in the router implementation cause the problem. If we look around, we'll
> see existing computers (including embedded ones) have not CPU and memory
> problems, and all problems we see with the routers are mainly caused by
> the bad implemented text.

I, and the rest of the Internet community, would like to invite you to start a
router company and show us how it can be done with far less memory.

;-)

More seriously, you might take a look around and note that there are not a
great deal of difference in the amount of memory needed to support a prefix
across the various well-known implementations.  Which is not to say that we're
blameless, just that a lot of good people have worked hard and are all equally
incompetent at conserving memory while simultaneously producing a scalable,
stable, feature-rich implementation.

Regards,
Tony