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

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 09:57:41PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > 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. 
> 
> This looks like a big win, so I'm looking for a down-side. If there is
> none, I would expect it to be the default.

Some additional fib memory overhead obviously, but unless you're
carrying an absurd number of next-hops it should barely be noticable.
We've been running it globally for quite a while, don't think we've ever
seen a problem with it. I'm sure it will become a default eventually,
like distributed ppm offloading which IIRC was introduced at around the
same time.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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