Avi Freedman writes:
Yes, a huge IGP (thousands of routes) is an issue that most people choosing 4500s vs. 7010s don't have to face :)
Hey, we have less than a thousand routes in our IGP. :-)
More seriously, they don't have to face that issue, but 8 MB of headroom is not very much. Once you get to much less than 3 or 4 MB things can get interesting due to transients.
If you're very paranoid it can help some (don't accept any routes from any of your peers from any other, and none of your peers will send you huge numbers of routes unless they're REALLY misconfigured and are seriously mungeing AS-PATHs. But yes, I'd agree - and buffer space can be a transient additional memory requirement also.
(For those buying 32MB routers, just make sure they can be upgraded to 64MB. The day of reckoning for 64MB routers is still a while off.)
Sigh, you can always hostile-aggegate, but one doesn't like to do that... Avi