Internet Exchanges supporting jumbo frames?

Wed Mar 9 14:45:40 UTC 2016

Kurt Kraut via NANOG wrote:
> I'm trying to convince my local Internet Exchange location (and it is not
> small, exceed 1 terabit per second on a daily basis) to adopt jumbo frames.

this has been tried before at many ixps.  No matter how good an idea it
sounds like, most organisations are welded hard to the idea of a 1500
byte mtu.  Even for those who use larger MTUs on their networks, you're
likely to find that there is no agreement on the mtu that should be
used.  Some will want 9000, some 9200, others 4470 and some people
will complain that they have some old device somewhere that doesn't
support anything more than 1522, and could everyone kindly agree to that
instead.

Meanwhile, if anyone gets the larger MTU wrong anywhere on their
network, packets will be blackholed and customers will end up unhappy.
Management will demand that the IXP jumbo service is disconnected until
the root cause is fixed, or worse still, will blame the IXP for some
mumble relating to how things worked better before enabling jumbo mtus.

Nick