"2M today, 10M with no change in technology"? An informal survey.

Tue Aug 28 01:34:10 UTC 2007

Ross,

On Aug 26, 2007, at 8:32 PM, Ross Callon wrote:
>> In another mailing list, someone has asserted that "noone believes
>> router vendors who say [they can support 2M routes today and 10M with
>> no change in technology]".
> Can you tell us who said this on which email list?

The discussion was occurring on the ARIN PPML list.

> I remember quite clearly at a much earlier meeting the statement that
> "obviously the Internet will keel over dead if the top level IP  
> routing
> table reaches 10,000 entries" (this is not an exact quote, but the
> "10,000" limit was what was stated at the time). At the time no one
> challenged this observation, although at the time I did wonder why
> someone thought that this was obviously true. Of course this statement
> has been obviously false for quite a few years.

Yes, and I remember when quite a few folks were doing "ISP code  
release of the day" to ISPs whose routers were having "issues"  
because of the routing load (ah, the good old days :-)).

> Of course, over the years there have been improvements in both
> implementations and protocols to make the growth from "less than  
> 10,000"
> to "more than 200,000" work okay. I don't think that anyone is  
> expecting
> that today's routers will work with 10,000,000 top level Internet  
> routes
> without any change at all in any aspect of the implementation.

Taken from http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0702/presentations/bof-report.pdf:

"In the case of Cisco that means delivering  switch routers with a  
capacity of about a million routes now. In the case of Foundry they  
are projecting that with some FIB aggregation techniques that  
switches capable of 512k fib entries will still be usable by 2014.   
Juniper is delivering new products (m120 mx960) with DRAM rather than  
TCAM/SRAM based FIB's with capacities on the order of 2 million ipv4  
routes and they have no reason to expect that they couldn't deliver  
10 million route FIB products in a few years given sufficient demand."

The question I am asking is whether or not folks in the operational  
community believe these statements are accurate or realistic in the  
face of real world Internet dynamics.  I know some people do not.   
I'm trying to get a feel from the wider community as I am in no  
position to judge.

Regards,
-drc