Was (Re: Route cache performance under stress

[Jamal Hadi <hadi@shell.cyberus.ca>]

On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Florian Weimer wrote:

> In general, the forwarding performance is nowadays specified in pps
> and even flows per second if you look carefully at the data sheets.

Ok, this is interesting. I have never seen the flows per second
used for simple L3 forwading. I have seen them being used for NAT or
firewalling.
Looking at the sprint traffic patterns, i think flows/sec is a
meaningful metric.

> Most vendors have learnt that people want routers with comforting
> worst-case behavior.  However, you have to read carefully, e.g. a
> Catalyst 6500 with Supervisor Engine 1 (instead of 2) can only create
> 650,000 flows per second, even if it has a much, much higher peak IP
> forwarding rate.
>

So 2Mpps of 650Kflows/sec ?

> (The times of routers which died when confronted with a rapid ICMP
> sweep across a /16 are gone for good, I hope.)

We should be able to punish specific misbehaving flows. Do you know
if any routers are implementing proper DOS tracebacks to allow for
inserting drop filters?

cheers,
jamal