BGP convergence problem

Tue Jun 8 16:22:04 UTC 2010

On Jun 8, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Andy B. wrote:

> I finally decided to shut down all peerings and brought them back one by one.
> 
> Everything is stable again, but I don't like the way I had to deal
> with it since it will most likely happen again when DECIX or an other
> IX we're at is having issues.
> 
> I've seen a few BGP convergence discussions on NANOG, but none about
> deadlock situations and what could be done to avoid them. Setting
> higher MTU or bigger hold queues did not help.

The Cisco 7600 and 6500 platforms are getting fairly old and have underpowered cpus these days.

Starting in SXH the control plane did not scale quite as well as in SXF.  This got better in SXI, but is not back on par with SXF performance yet.

I mostly attribute this to a combination of bloat in software and routing tables.  I would start to look for a replacement sooner rather than later.

- Jared