Core router bakeoff?

Sat May 9 06:24:18 UTC 1998

paul at vix.com (Paul Vixie) writes:

> > > BTW, NetBSD with the recent flow cache mods can handle at least
> > > 150,000 packets per second. We haven't seen what the actual upper
> > > limit is, but that number doesn't seem to be eating a lot of CPU.
> > 
> > Interesting.  Have you done any scalability testing?  Per-flow state has
> > been shown to scale poorly in Internet backbones.  
> 
> That was with one flow.  The idea of "there basically aren't flows" is not
> obvious on first approach to these problems, wouldn't you say, Tony :-)?

Not obvious to some, but we sat and watched a significant router vendor
make that mistake (despite good advice to the contrary) anyhow.  I'd hate
to see someone else repeat that mistake.

Tony