Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments:
Last week the global routing table (as seen from some perspectives) supposedly exceeded 512K routes, and weird things started to happen to some people that are using old platforms that by default support 512K IPv4 routes in the switching hardware.
I’m still wondering whether the BGP table size was the root cause of the observed outages. Cisco’s documentation (at least this document) is pretty sloppy when it comes to the fact that usually 1K = 1024, not 1000 — I’d expect the hard limit to be @ 524.288 routes … but then maybe Cisco’s hardware works with decimal arithmetic.
Great look at the math behind the 512k route problem from Ivan. Bonus points if you read the title in his voice and answered with “It depends…”.
Read more at: Do you really need to see all 512K Internet routes?
