[7925] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: "routing table slots" and the real problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Sun Mar 2 13:43:48 1997
To: mo@uu.net (Mike O'Dell)
cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 02 Mar 1997 12:09:54 EST."
<QQcfds07529.199703021709@rodan.UU.NET>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 1997 13:39:33 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Mike O'Dell writes:
> Yet again people keep talking about "the size of the routing tables"
> as being the deep problem, and this makes people say silly things
> like "FOO is protecting router memory".
>
> Thinking about it this way is funamentally and fatally incorrect.
>
> The REAL problem is the growing complexity of the ROUTING COMPUTATION,
> not the size of the resulting forwarding table. even if routers
> had infinite memory, we would still be crushed by the routing
> computation if allowed to grow unchecked.
True enough. Of course, this doesn't mean that we can't have routing
table growth, as we will have processor capacity growth, but it does
mean that the growth of the routing tables must be kept in line with
what the router processors can do.
Perry
