On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Dean Anderson wrote:
ip is a connectionless protocol. before hitting the reply key, think about that.
I thought about it. It seems to me that a router is not presented with a stream of randomly addressed packets. In any time frame, there are going to be from 1 to many hundreds of packets between the same set of addresses.
This is a major fallacy. Many promising local ISPs had experience with this when they were smaller and more local. I am sure dkatz will tell you of his experiences with trying to get caching algorithms to work well with core network flows. In short, the core network flows cause so much churn in cache memory that the working set of the cache tends to be the size of the entire FIB to get adequate performance. Caching does NOT work in context of tcp flows at the core level. Period.
the packets. By contrast, an IP packet traversing an IP network carries all the state it needs with it. However, that doesn't mean that you need to start from scratch each time you see the same src/dest pair. Methods which hold some additional state in the router for faster processing can be used to speed things up.
Once again, at the core of promising local ISP's, this does NOT work.
The full route table could be very large. Much larger than 256Meg or even 4Gig. And even moving to disk backed storage (many gigs) most likely means that access would still be in tens or hundreds of milliseconds, not seconds. However, any given router doesn't really need to use very much of it at any given time.
Full route table size is not a problem. You can burn a hard disk as you mentioned to store it. The issue is getting data in and out of the processor, i.e. number of pins. Core flows are not ameneable to caching. This approach will fail the first time you see a new packet and need to swap from hard disk. /vijay