In message <2.2.32.19960406011224.007175e4@mail.cts.com>, "Kent W. England" wri tes:

At 08:25 AM 4/5/96 -0600, Tim Salo wrote:

...

Perhaps, the [anticipated] consolidation of ISPs will be a significant event in the efforts to control routing table size.

-tjs

Do we need address leasing to hasten that process or should we let the market decide? In any event, anyone buying up a bunch of ISPs will have a difficult time cleaning up the aggregation of addresses they inherit.

--Kent

BTW, I thought it was the updates, peerings and flaps that was the true problem, not the absolute number of routing table entries.

Not a problem at all in a well designed and implemented router. With say 30,000 routes and 100,000 updates in the queue, just empty the inbound queue and decide what the end state is (including what get dampenned and ignored now) and pass this end state on. Install routes at a lower priority. Pass the end state on at a low priority. Next guy get far fewer update. Dampenning actually puts a ceiling on it. In a well designed router you can handle an arbirarily high amount of routing change. If it is really well designed you won't drop any packets at all going to the destinations that are not changing. The only question is then whether you have enough memory to hold the routing table if it continues to grow. Today it is a problem. :-) Curtis