[10404] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Plethora of UUnet outages and instabilities
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (the Riz)
Tue Jul 1 12:28:28 1997
From: the Riz <riz@boogers.sf.ca.us>
To: brian@organic.com (Brian Behlendorf)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 1997 09:11:35 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970701010703.007a3630@localhost> from Brian Behlendorf at "Jul 1, 97 01:07:03 am"
Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> At 09:49 AM 7/1/97 +0200, Hank Nussbacher forwarded from Network World:
> > UUNET started upgrading the memory on the routers, which Cisco
> > contends was the real culprit. Cisco recommends that its ISP
> > customers use 128M bytes of total memory on their route switch
> > processor boards, Michelet said. UUNET uses 64M-byte memory boards
> > on most, if not all, of its 7,500 routers.
> >
> > UUNET said it never received a recommendation from Cisco concerning
> > memory for its 7,500 routers. ``But clearly, once this event
> > occurred, we discussed the memory issue with Cisco, and we agreed
> > the right course of action would be to upgrade the routing memory to
> > 128M bytesŁ,'' said Jim McManus, vice president of systems
> > engineering at UUNET.
>
> Ouch! A couple of questions:
>
> 1) Is the "7500" the actual number of routers they'll have to upgrade, or
> are they referring to the Cisco 7500 product line? That's an awful lot of
> routers to upgrade, so UUnet could have problems for awhile.
>
> 2) What could have caused the memory requirements to jump so dramatically?
> And if it's due to the routing table "for the whole Internet", why weren't
> others affected?
>
My guess is it was a memory leak of some sort on Cisco's part; NETCOM has
run into a few of these lately. (Thankfully, we caught them before they
got out of hand) There seem to be a few bugs in IOS that cause severe
memory fragmentation; we've gotten fixes for *several* bugs of this type
over the last year, on various platforms. (The latest is one that
fragments I/O memory on 25XX routers; thankfully, this doesn't affect the
core)
+j
--
Jeff Rizzo http://boogers.sf.ca.us/~riz
