smd@clock.org (Sean M. Doran) writes:

BGP is fundamentally rate-limited by virtue of running on TCP.

While that's necessary, it turns out to not be sufficient. A competent implementation must also meter out the changes that it sends to a peer in some sensical fashion. IOS, for example, had a hack in it so that if it was blowing out memory, it would rate limit the number of updates that it would send to a peer.

By contrast, IGPs are *not* fundamentally rate-limited -- retransmissions are not congestion avoiding in any IGP that I know of.

In addition to the specifications that Henk has noted, it's become very clear that an IGP implementation that does NOT rate limit itself is very likely to become unstable. Tony