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 bytesÙ,'' 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