comparing open source BGP stacks performance

[Laura Smith]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Tuesday, August 24th, 2021 at 8:03 PM, Chris Malayter <mustang at terahertz.net> wrote:

> OpenBGPd has always been a dog.

For those of you who don't monitor the OpenBSD mailing list, explanation from Claudio Jeker (one of the key figures in OpenBGPD dev):

The massive amount of memory used in OpenBGPD comes from the fact that unlike BIRD OpenBGPD runs with a full Adj-RIB-Out.

The tests result in large amount of prefixes that need to be tracked.

If you have 100 peers announcing 10000 random prefixes then you end up with 100 * 100 * 10000 = 100Million elements to manage.

This is not a realistic test since in most cases the number of routes in the Adj-RIB-Out is limited (even on route servers).

In the end for day to day use OpenBGPD performs well enough for many people. Future releases will focus more on performance and optimizing Adj-RIB-Out is on the list.