The Gorgon's Knot. Was: Re: Verio Peering Question

Fri Sep 28 21:09:24 UTC 2001

| When Sprint was filtering there was a demonstrable need based on the 64meg
| limit that
| mainstream routers had for memory at the time.  I do not see that there is
| any such physical
| limitation today and I guarentee that the router vendors (all two of them)
| have learned the lesson
| of not including enough address lines on the equipment to allow for easy
| memory upgrades.

So we should throw away all the 7200s and similar routers today
because they are in the way of growing numbers of long prefixes,
replacing them with new routers manufactured since the time of
the above-mentioned lesson?   And when shall we throw away
the 12000s and similar routers (or components thereof) because 
they are underpowered in the face of routing-table growth, compared
to well-established alternatives?

Incidentally, the lesson learned was that sheer storage AMOUNT
is only a (perhaps small) part of the problem, compared to the
processing necessary to use that storage in support of dynamic
routing (in terms of CPU and in terms of accesses to that memory).

	Sean.