most recently, Guido Appenzeller, Isaac Keslassy and Nick McKeown have written a paper that they presented at SIGCOMM 2004 about "sizing router
buffers" that is very informative and goes against the grain of the amount of buffering required in routers/switches.
In the paper http://klamath.stanford.edu/~keslassy/download/tr04_hpng_060800_sizing.pdf they state as follows: ----------------- While we have evidence that buffers can be made smaller, we haven't tested the hypothesis in a real operational network. It is a little difficult to persuade the operator of a functioning, profitable network to take the risk and remove 99% of their buffers. But that has to be the next step, and we see the results presented in this paper as a first step towards persuading an operator to try it. ---------------- So, has anyone actually tried their buffer sizing rules? Or do your current buffer sizing rules actually match, more or less, the sizes that they recommend? --Michael Dillon