|> From: Adam Rothschild [mailto:asr@latency.net] |> Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 10:36 PM |> |> On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 03:23:24PM -0700, Roeland Meyer wrote: |> > At $99US for 512MB of PC133 RAM (the point is, RAM is disgustingly |> > cheap and getting cheaper), more RAM in the routers is a quick |> > answer. Router clusters are another answer, and faster CPUs are yet |> > another. |> |> Throwing more RAM and CPU into our routers (assuming for a |> moment that |> they're most certainly all Linux PC's running Zebra) is not the |> solution you're looking for; the problem of RIB processing still |> remains. |> |> Getting a forwarding table requires extracting data from the RIB, and |> this is the problem, because RIBs are very large and active, and are |> being accessed by lots of reading and writing processes. RIB |> processing is substantial, and is only getting worse. SMP systems and multi-ported RAM is a good enough stop-gap. If I didn't like non-deterministic systems, I might suggest Echelon technologies (hardware-based neural nets). |> > If the IETF is being at all effective, that should start now and |> > finish sometime next year, so that we can start the 5-year |> > technology roll-out cycle. |> |> Roeland, The IETF is eagerly awaiting your solution. Send code. See |> Tony Li's presentation at the Atlanta NANOG on why this solution of |> jamming RAM and CPU into boxes is not a long term viable answer: |> |> <http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0102/witt.html> I've read that and largely agree. The hardware approach was only meant to buy time, while the geniuses at the IETF find a better approach. What I don't agree on, and am amazed to see, the admission that they don't know at what point the convergeince problem becomes intractible. Or even, if it does... that sounds more like a fundimental lack of understanding of the algorithm itself. |> In short, state growth at each level must be constrained and must not |> outstrip Moore's law, and to be viable in an economic sense, it must |> lag behind Moore's law. In the mid-80's, I worked on an OCR problem, involving a add-on 80186 processor card. We used a brute-force solution. It as too slow on the 8 MHz CPU. Years later, with the advent of faster hardware, the product was released. It's funny that the market timing was just about perfect. It gave that company a huge head start, when the market turned hot. It is alright to target performance/capacity solutions expected to be present at the time of product release (about 5-years from now). In fact, that's about the only way I see the problem getting solved.