Plethora of UUnet outages and instabilities

Tue Jul 1 16:11:35 UTC 1997

Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> At 09:49 AM 7/1/97 +0200, Hank Nussbacher forwarded from Network World:
> > UUNET started upgrading the memory on the routers, which Cisco
> > contends was the real culprit. Cisco recommends that its ISP
> > customers use 128M bytes of total memory on their route switch
> > processor boards, Michelet said. UUNET uses 64M-byte memory boards
> > on most, if not all, of its 7,500 routers.
> >
> > UUNET said it never received a recommendation from Cisco concerning
> > memory for its 7,500 routers. ``But clearly, once this event
> > occurred, we discussed the memory issue with Cisco, and we agreed
> > the right course of action would be to upgrade the routing memory to
> > 128M bytesÙ,'' said Jim McManus, vice president of systems
> > engineering at UUNET.
> 
> Ouch!  A couple of questions:
> 
> 1) Is the "7500" the actual number of routers they'll have to upgrade, or
> are they referring to the Cisco 7500 product line?  That's an awful lot of
> routers to upgrade, so UUnet could have problems for awhile.
> 
> 2) What could have caused the memory requirements to jump so dramatically?
> And if it's due to the routing table "for the whole Internet", why weren't
> others affected?  
> 

My guess is it was a memory leak of some sort on Cisco's part;  NETCOM has
run into a few of these lately.  (Thankfully, we caught them before they
got out of hand)  There seem to be a few bugs in IOS that cause severe
memory fragmentation;  we've gotten fixes for *several* bugs of this type
over the last year, on various platforms.  (The latest is one that
fragments I/O memory on 25XX routers;  thankfully, this doesn't affect the
core) 

+j

-- 
Jeff Rizzo                                         http://boogers.sf.ca.us/~riz