Re: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

[Adrian Chadd <adrian () creative net au>]

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.

*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