[arin-ppml] Routing Research Group is about to decide its scalable routing recommendation

[Danny McPherson]

On Dec 17, 2009, at 6:02 PM, Robin Whittle wrote:

> Further to the threads:
> 
>  A challenge to the assumption that a big DFZ is a problem
>  debunking the myth that Moore's law helps

I find it interesting that folks in RRG are worrying most about 
the number of unique *prefixes* in the DFZ, while the number of 
unique *routes* (prefix/path attributes) is growing steeper.

Further, most all the work in the IETF BGP-related working groups
aims to ADD more routes in order to support multi-path, alleviate
route oscillation, provide faster convergence, obtain more operations
visibility, etc.., pretty much completely in odds with the RRG work, 
and exacerbating the issues of scalability and instability, path 
hunting, RIB issues, RAM, CPU, FIB I/O, etc..

More on some of my thoughts related to this topic here:

<http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/74/slides/grow-6.pdf>
<http://www.tcb.net/rr-thing.pdf>

Perhaps the disparity between the IETF work and the IRTF RRG work 
is that the operators are busy running networks and dealing with 
real operational issues, while the RRG folks are solving problems 
that won't been an issue for a decade or more..  This seems eerily 
similar to the IPv6 conundrum as of late, eh?

-danny