[j-nsp] Miercom Competitive Performance Testing Results: Cisco ASR9000 vs Juniper MX960

[Pekka Savola]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Patrik Olsson wrote:
> I dont know when there is a an official response, but the report seems very 
> Cisco friendly...
> I have performed very tough tests on the MX, putting both multicast and QoS 
> to the test and I have seen none of the problems Miercom claims they see...

Have you tested MX also during RIB or FIB changes?  I'd like to use 
this as a soapbox.  On Juniper platforms, when a next-hop changes, 
this results in first DELETE and then (maybe much later) ADD 
operations in FIB.  We have noticed that when BGP next-hop changes for 
300K prefixes, this has led to up to 7 minutes of packet loss due to a 
lack of FIB entry for a destination. This was seen on T-series, but MX 
has the same architectural limitations.  This slowness was introduced 
sometime in JunOS 8.x. And this is "working as designed" and "no way 
to speed it up".

Hopefully at some point someone will do performance testing in these 
kind of scenarios as well; I don't recall seeing such a test myself.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings