Route Scalability

[tgionis]

Hi

I am after some scalability documents for the Cat4K Supervisor III or Cat3550 with respect to max number of unicast/mcast routes (without performance impact), max number of mcast source/group pairs, max number of OSPF areas/adjacencies/etc.

Does anyone have this information ? Can anyone point to this ?

thanks

TG

[donewald]

TG,

There is no concrete answer to this. In the basic sense a route, depending on protocol takes a certain amount of memory to store so the number of routes would be important to determine normal memory consumption. Then, especially with OSFP, there is the routing calculation to get the best routes out of what is leared by the routing peers. This is usually more CPU intensive than memory intensive. There is no straight measure to this either. It's based on network activity (link flapping, etc) number of peers, type of protocol implemented, how well it is designed. So, basically there is no clear cut answer on this. My customer for example has about 8K routes running some routers with 64MB DRAM in systems. These routes, at times, consume upwards of 20 MB of memory. When events happen in the network CPU can burst to 100%. I hope this helps.. although not answering much.

Regards,

Don

[tgionis]

however, i know for example that the 3550 supports 32K routes and 8K mcast routes, but this must be a theoretical number right ? for the Cat3550 hardware whats realistic without performance degradation :?

regs

TG

[donewald]

This 32K routes and 8K masks limit is due to mls and TCAm limitations. This is is HW specific thing on this bax alone. There are certain other limitations you'll run into with other boxes but your question was rather general before with number of OSPF routers/LSA's/etc.

Most of this is still driven strictly from a resource perspective.

Hope this helps,

Don