[sorry - should have replied to Paul directly but hit the 'd' key too soon]

...

Bay claims to hold the entire Internet routing table in just 4-6MB RAM per BGP peer (I assume this is after convergence). They say that the method in which they do this is proprietary. I am just wondering if it is possible.....

Let's see. Here is a router I used a couple of months ago: ... 38 peers configured. Using 52565 Routes out of a total of 266710. 24135 unique paths maintained. ... And memory usage: Process Memory Use Statistics ----------------------------- Name Slot Used %Used ---------------- ---- -------- ----- ... bgp 9 23251104 48 ... So, 23251104 bytes / 266710 routes would be around 87 bytes per route, multiple that by say 48000 or so for a full table now and that would make it 4.1M per copy. Note though that the 23M used above is not just route memory, it is also for the BGP code itself (most software modules on a Bay are loaded dynamically when needed) and other BGP things like filters and such (although the above router did not have too many). -Marten PS different sets of BGP routes may of course alter these numbers, I just wanted to provide a live sample to answer the question.