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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: What is the limit? (was RE: multi-homing fixes)
On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 04:58:03AM -0700, Sean M. Doran wrote: > If the size or the dynamicism of the global routing system grows > for a sustained period faster than the price/performance curve of > EITHER memory OR processing power, the Internet will FAIL again. This is great FUD. First rate. Have you considered working on a political campaign? This statement seems so true, but is so false. We are all being held hostage by vendors here, and I hope the rest of the people on here are letting them know as loudly as I do at every opportunity. Routers, in terms of route processing ability, are about as far from state of the art as computers get these days. I can buy a < $1000 PC with 10x the MIPS and twice the memory of major vendors largest routers. Intel and IBM have built supercomputers that can model millions of atoms in a nuclear weapon. IBM has a machine that can play chess. Oracle can set TPC records well over the average rate of change of the BGP table on data sets 1000 times as large. Once when I had hardware designers in the room from a major router vendor I asked them 'why isn't the CPU on your route processor socketed'? They looked at me completely puzzled, looked at each other, and then asked in a timid voice "why would you want to do that"? I looked at them and said 'so you can upgrade it when a faster CPU comes out'. They replied with "we don't want people field upgrading CPU's". I just shook my head and said it would be nice if when a faster one came out they could spin a new rev of the board with a new CPU faster, I didn't want to upgrade in the field. They then started scribbling notes furiously. Don't even get me started on the discussion of why they were custom designing a board for the route processor, when there are off the shelf motherboards, or if it must fit in a form factor, motherboard designs that would be less costly for them, use all off the shelf parts, and would allow them to bring things to market quicker. I bet at least half the people reading this e-mail have more CPU and memory in the box they are using for that task than the largest core router in their network has for processing routes. And that's without exploring the things router vendors could do to really speed things up, like true multi-processor designs, or real amounts of memory. I don't build a server with less than 1G of ECC RAM these days, because it's $200. But if I buy a $1M router I'm lucky to get 64M for processing routes. Look back. Routers have always lagged _WAY_ behind most other computer technology in terms of processor power, RAM, and general purpose IO. In fact, I would go so far as to venture that they are falling further behind, that is not keeping up with moores law even when it is true. There was no reason for those past failures. It was a combination of bean counters, cluelessness, and lazyness. The routing table is growing slower than the number of lines of code in Windows, and god help us if we can make Windows "work" we should be able to do some simple routing. -- Leo Bicknell - [email protected] Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - [email protected], www.tmbg.org
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