OT : BGP soft-reconfiguration inbound memory costs

Hi all,

For a long time, word on the street was that "soft-reconfig inbound" takes
quite a bit of memory and is not as useful as it once was since most BGP
implementations have added route refresh capabilities. I've also read that
"the code has been optimized and that the memory impact is insignificant
nowdays". Kinda contradictory. I can't seem to find much information on the
exact cost in memory of this feature.

For some time, we had this feature enabled on a few peers with full feeds.
One would think that by removing it, we would save quite a bit of ram. We
didn't see any quantifiable difference in RAM usage.

I've tried measuring the exact cost of this feature in a lab environment but
the following show commands weren't very helpful :

show proc mem | i BGP : the bgp processes seem to take the exact same amount
of RAM
show ip bgp sum : the memory and path/bestpath fields seems to be exactly
the same, whether the command is there or not
show ip bgp neigh : can't find anything there either

Does anybody have any clear understanding of the memory costs of the
"soft-reconfiguration inbound" command?

Regards,

Eric Lauriault, #27521

Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
Received on Fri Feb 25 2011 - 16:21:30 ART