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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Force10 Gear
On 9/7/08, Frank Bulk <[email protected]> wrote: > I think it would be interesting to put a table of routing devices together along with the commands it takes to knock down their forwarding rates. And to find out what platform has the higher percentage drop in forwarding rate. > > As mentioned elsewhere, it's not the pps, but operations per second. Send a 3kpps stream of multicast packets with TTL=1 towards a sup720 and you can watch it keel over and cry uncle. It really, really doesn't take much these days to kill high-end hardware; they're so optimized for a specific class of traffic that they handle well in hardware, as that's what the bulk of the normal traffic is, and that's what the marketing department needs to chase to keep up with the competition; any traffic profile outside of that doesn't get the same focus from the hardware forwarding teams because that's not where the pressure to keep up from the marketplace is coming from. *Nobody* goes out and says "I have $10M to spend on routers, but to qualify they must be able to forward 10Mpps of IPv4 packets with IP options enabled, sustained rate, with no loss". That's just not a driving market force right now. I think you would find that your table simply reflects what the *bulk* of the traffic profiles from major customers represent; those areas that cause the routers pain in terms of forwarding are exactly those traffic patterns that are *not* highly represented among the majority of the customer base. Matt
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