Re: [bmwg] I-D Action: draft-ietf-bmwg-ca-bench-meth-01.txt

[Ilya Varlashkin <[e-mail]>]

On Mar 12, 2012, at 20:56 , Mike Hamilton wrote:

>> 9. With regard to Section 3.7.1, the range of IP addresses noted in RFC
>> 2544 covers
>> only 128K addresses. 128K addresses is unlikely to stress the forwarding
>> tables
>> of many devices available today. Further, they are all unicast addresses.
>> What if
>> we wish to test using multicast flows (e.g., RTP video)? It seems
>> unnecessary to
>> restrict users of this draft to the RFC 2544 IP address range.
> With the suggestion from Al, RFC 1918 private address space may also
> be used.  This has been added to the draft.
> 

I suspect that if DUT is not older than 15 years, then it's quite likely that its forwarding plane stress depends not on number of IP addresses but on the depth of lookup (length of the key prefix) and number of such lookups. As long as search key is flushed from CPU cache, then a million lookups with only dozen addresses is probably as good as million lookups of unique addresses.

/iLya