adrian, to take your point one step further. the architecture of the router and the mechanism by which it forwards packets differs for various vendors. to simply state "CPU" is a non-sense when it comes to routers. You need to be more specific and look into the scaling effects on scheduler performance, switching fabric performance and architecture, Buffering, forwarding design ( centralised or distributed ), and ASIC development. Remeber Moores law applies to ASICs and their "widget" density. my 2c worths -- --- Marc Teichtahl, B. Eng (Comp Sys) RMIT, IEEE 11016334 Network Sloven and Engineer "I never remember what i did tomorrow" PGP Key ID: 0x8E69E8A1 On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Adrian Chadd wrote:
On Mon, Apr 02, 2001, Travis Pugh wrote:
Not to oversimplify, but assuming we can continue to separate forwarding from the routing process itself, is this really a situation that calls for a complete redesign of BGP? If you look at the routing processors on Cisco and Juniper hardware, Cisco's GSR is using a 200Mhz MIPS RISC processor and Juniper is using a 333Mhz Mobile Pentium II.
With RISC reaching 1Ghz and Intel pushing 2Ghz, it appears that the actual processors in use by the 2 big vendors are a couple of years behind. What happens to the boxes ability to process a 500,000 route table if you quadruple it's memory and give it 5 times more processing power?
Also, it would likely require a re-write of software, but what's keeping us from using SMP in routers?
Performance of a routing protocol is not a function of just the CPU avaliable.
Performance of a routing protocol is a function of the CPU avaliable and the network characteristics.
*shakes head* people keep forgetting this. Do you guys also think you can solve the internets problems by adding more bandwidth?
Adrian