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

[Igor Gashinsky]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2009, Stefan Fouant wrote:

:: On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>wrote:
:: 
:: I thought this was the whole idea behind the introduction of the indirect
:: next-hop.  Basically abstracting a level of recursion so that when
:: underlying next-hop paths changed, all they needed to do was to do a KRT
:: change for the indirect-next-hop pointer to the new path.  Any routes that
:: referenced the indirect-next-hop then automatically utilized the new path
:: via this mechanism, without having to do a KRT update for thousands of
:: routes...
:: 
:: Am I missing something or did this behavior change at some point?

There are 2 levels where indirect next-hop can be used, one is on the RE 
to speed up RIB convergence, and the resulting FIB computation, and the 
other one on the PFE to speed up the actual FIB update itself. Juniper 
implemented the one on the RE first, and that's been there forever, but 
the PFE one is only available in the newer versions (and, can be enabled 
via the "set routing-options forwarding-table indirect-next-hop" knob).

Configuring that knob will greatly speed up your actual convergence times. 

-igor