What are the current limits?

Sat Feb 3 05:37:00 UTC 1996

Excuse my newbiness, but with all the current talk of reducing route table size
and such, I have a few questions:

What is a current router table size?  How is it measured? (in routes? or
kilobytes? or megabytes?)  How big a router is needed to handle it?  By
'big' I mean how much RAM and/or cpu is needed to deal with just routing
and route table updates and flap control?

Sepearte, but related, is the issue of bit shoveling.  Given the minimum
router that will handle a full routing table, how much bandwidth can
it shovel through its various ports?  I'm assuming this is related more to 
CPU speed than to memory constraints.  Given a full routing table, how
much bandwidth can routers of various sizes handle?  

I guess what I'm looking for are the real 'just-this-side-of-breakage'
limits.  So we need to reduce route table size - okay, fine, but _how much_
do we need to reduce it?  at what size does it become handlable?  

I hope these questions make sense, I'm fairly new at this.

See you at NANOG!

  --Paul Jimenez
    Freeside Communications

What are the *current* limits?

What are the current limits?