Re: Bird vs Quagga revisited

[Andy Davidson <andy () nosignal org>]

On 22/08/12 06:19, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> Sorry to disrupt the bad cabling thread, but I'd like to revisit a
> thread from 2 years ago.  I have read over the NANOG presentations:
> http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog48/presentations/Monday/Jasinska_RouteServer_N48.pdf
>
> http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog48/presentations/Monday/Filip_BIRD_final_N48.pdf

Much of the Quagga pain discussed openly in 2010 was related to its
performance as a route-server (which in a large instance might need to
converge many millions of best paths, in a multiple table setup).  A
route-server is more like a database which uses bgp as its interface,
than it is a router.  The problems that we felt as exchange operators at
this time were different to the ones that people using these packages as
a router felt.

> Both Quagga and BIRD have developed since the comparison in 2010:
> http://savannah.nongnu.org/news/?group=quagga
> http://bird.network.cz/?o_news

I'm not clear what you care about from a performance point of view -
forwarding ?  acting as a route-server ?  collector ?  BIRD is a great,
super-fast route-server daemon - much "better" than typical competitors
Quagga and OpenBGPd at this job.  In a forwarding capacity, I do not
know and I would really think that Operating system performance and
environment tuning will have more to do with forwarding performance than
the daemon used.

I am hoping that forwarding best-practice information for Quagga
eventually comes out of this project :  http://opensourcerouting.org/

Andy