Noel Chiappa wrote:
While I agree that whatever's causing this ought to be fixed, there are some points we need to not lose sight of. First, fixing this would be a *one-time* improvement in the growth curve for the update rate (versus long-term time). I.e. you'd see a flat spot (or a drop) in the curve, after which it would resume its previous growth. Second, 25% is not peanuts, but it's also not an order of magnitude, and eliminating these wouldn't get us into a whole new operating region. I don't know what the current growth rate for BGP updates is, but if it's anything like the growth rate of the table itself (as one might reasonably assume it is), 25% is not a long calendar time. Again, it ought to be fixed, but let's not kid ourselves that this is the solution to our problems.
Actually Noel, I'm not sure that I agree with either of your assertions, and the basic reason is a lack of an analysis of this over a long term over a number of years (the data is there, but someone has to set up the computational run across it). My intuition says that as the degree of interconnection in the inter-AS cloud increases, then the BGP "amplification" of underlying events increases, and the same set of underlying events could be the cause of 26%, 27%,... etc of all updates in the future. i.e. the querstion in my mind is: are the dynamics we've been seeing in update load an artifact of the increasing size of the internet, the increasing interconnection of the Internet, the increasing level of policy diversity within the Internet or all three - or do all three growth elements tend to interact with the rather chatty way in which BGP undertakes convergence to create a long term traffic trend? If this is the case and if we understand that we really cannot change the dynamics of the first three elements, then what precisely is the nature of the interaction with BGP, and is it possible that by altering BGP update propagation behaviors is it possible to shift the BGP load onto a different trajectory? Your message says to me: "no, a modification of BGP creates a short term reduction in update load, but the underlying growth factors are independent of this." I am not sure that I agree with this proposition, and more data and more experimentation is probably a good way to understand this a little better.
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