Re: [RRG] Re: FYI -- Informal LISP BOF scheduled for lunch time on Thursday

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Robert Raszuk <raszuk@juniper.net>

    > Till now even looking ten years ahead no one can show the significant
    > proof that "routing is about to collapse".
    > ...
    > there are number of vendors with deployed platforms which are today
    > carrying ten fold number of routes what today's internet carry for some
    > other applications.

The issue is not just how many routes any box (or set of them) can hold
(although that is a significant concern, because there is installed base all
over the world, and not all the component organizations have budget to
replace/upgrade it all freely).

The thing is that today's routing architecture is a giant distributed
computation, one which doesn't 'run to completion', but is always running,
responding to changes in the world-wide physical connectivity. A change
happens, and things respond, and eventually affected paths settle down and
stabilize after some time Ts. Needless to say, it's not really feasible to
really completely model the global system's behaviour in any kind of smaller
network and/or test lab.

My impression is that most people who are worried about the "routing [being]
about to collapse" are worried about a number of things, one of which is about
that giant distributed computation going unstable (e.g. Ts going over some
kind of knee). A good analogy is the various breakdowns in the North American
power grid over the last couple of decades, all of which included various
poorly-understood large-scale 'system effects', complex interactions that
didn't show up in small-scale systems.

Maybe it's not a problem, and we don't need to worry about it, but the thing
is that it's so complex, and so little studied/understood, that it's hard to
be sure there's no problem lurking out there.

	Noel

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