[c-nsp] Adequate RAM in 7206VXR/NPE-G1?

[David Coulson]

Rick Kunkel wrote:
> Thanks for the response!  And for the time being, I may very well follow
> your suggestion about filtering down to the default route...  Fine idea...
>   
Make sure they send you a default first. Some carriers send you 
everything *except* a default as part of their full table.
> A couple quick follow-up questions:
>
> - Is there a way to tell if I'm losing any of the routes because of 
> insufficient memory?  Or would that be reflected by my lowest value in the 
> show mem being zero?
>   
Your router will die before you get to 0. Period :-) As far as I know, 
IOS won't magically filter routes for you based upon memory, so it'll 
just try to shove them all in, then drop dead with a malloc error.

Most of the time when I've had issues, my router has failed trying to 
allocate something silly like 64k before it gets to 0 due to 
fragmentation, so I'm surprised you lasted this long.
> - As far as performance goes...  So, I'm short on processor memory, but
> I've still got what appears to be a healthy amount of I/O memory left.  
> How will this affect performance?  Does the I/O memory leave me plenty of 
> space for routing packets through the router, or would the shortage of 
> Processor memory mess with this?
You should be okay, however remember if you run out of memory due to 
BGP, the first thing the router will disable is CEF so that's going to 
hurt - Even with a NPE-G1, you can't process switch that amount of 
traffic. I imagine that'll kill your buffers eventually and drop the 
packets.