[Xorp-users] Routing Capacity in XORP

[Pavlin Radoslavov]

> First of, thanks for your reply! The routing capacity I mean falls
> to your second statement about maximum number of routes that can
> be stored in memory or RAM. So in this case, it only depends on
> the amount of memory storage available in your system. What if I
> have 128MB of RAM and then I want to know if how much is the
> capacity of that given RAM, what tool should I used in generating
> routes? Is there any available tools for free to use? And on this
> given  RAM capacity, I need to test each routing protocols either
> unicast [BGP, OSPF, RIP and static] and multicast [IGMP, MLD and
> PIM-SM]. I think this way, I can see how each routing protocols
> will be benchmark according to RAM load. Just tell me if I am
> doing the right benchmark.

Are you looking for an answer for practical purpose or for
academic purpose?

If you are looking for a practical answer, BGP with full feed is
going to be the largest memory user. I don't remember what is the
typical usage, but the BGP folks on the list can give you some rough
estimations.

Theoretically, the state for the multicast routing protocols can be
much worse than BGP. However, because the is a very small number of
multicast sessions on global scale (e.g., tens or low hundreds) this
is practically not an issue (yet).

The IGMP/MLD memory usage should be dominated by the process startup
size. The extra memory usage (per joined group per joined interface)
should be relatively low: e.g., if you start testing with a large
number of receivers, I wouldn't be surprised if the bottleneck is
somewhere else (e.g., the CPU or communication overhead).

Unfortunately I am not aware of any free tools that you can use to
investigate the memory usage as a function of the routing load.
For protocols like Static you could measure the used memory when no
routes are installed. Then configure a large number of routes and
measure the difference in memory usage. This should give you an idea
how the memory usage grows.
For other protocols you would need to do something similar, but then
you need to find or write tools to generate the appropriate protocol
control messages.
E.g., Nemesis (http://nemesis.sourceforge.net/) is the tool that
comes to mind.

Regards,
Pavlin


> Thanks.
> 
> Diego
> 
> 
> Pavlin Radoslavov <pavlin at icir.org> wrote: Diego Salvador  wrote:
> 
> > Hi! How to test routing capacity on XORP protocols in unicast (RIP, OSPF, BGP) and multicast (PIM-SM, MLD and IGMP)?
> 
> Please define "routing capacity".
> 
> If it is the max. forwarding bandwidth, it is determined by the
> underlying system, because XORP implements only the control plane.
> 
> If it is, say, the maximum number of routes that can be stored, it
> is practically limited by the amount of RAM you have in your system.
> 
> Regards,
> Pavlin
> 
> > 
> > Thanks.
> > 
> > Diego
> > 
> >        
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