Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG!gross
From: gross@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG (Phill Gross)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  [Phil Dykstra:  more interesting numbers]
Message-ID: <8804141331.AA26637@gateway.mitre.org>
Date: 14 Apr 88 13:31:49 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

Mike, Phil,

Fascinating numbers.  Do we understand why the mailbridges have such a
higher drop rate?  

Until recently, of course, the 7 mailbridges were still clunky old LSI
11/23's.  That would account for some performance difference since I
believe the NSFnet Fuzzies are 73's.  However, the IETF Adopt-A-Core-Gateway
program finally caught up to the mailbridges a couple weeks ago, so they
should all be 73's now too.  What is the date for your numbers?

Or is it that the mailbridges (indeed all core gateways) simply spend too
much time processing routing updates and not enough time forwarding
packets.  Almost half the core traffic seems to be routing updates.  That
means for every other packet, the gateway has to go off and spend cycles
thinking about something besides packet forwarding.  (Oh where are those
Butterflies?)

Phill Gross