Re: [Idr] why has 4096 bytes limit on BGP messages size?

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, Tony Li wrote:
> On Jun 13, 2007, at 10:01 PM, Fenggen Jia wrote:
>> hi,all,
>>       I am wondering why BGP has 4096 bytes limit on all its
>>       messages,should we leave it to the implementator to decide,thanks!
>
>
> Well, the problem with that is that a sender could then create an arbitrarily 
> long message, which could be arbitrarily problematic for a receiver.

While this is an interesting historical perspective, I'm not sure how 
relevant it is anymore.  How does BGP differ from other TCP 
applications (almost none of which specify the maximum byte limit in 
the application)?  Are routers so low-end that they cannot allocate 
more than 4K memory per message, or that they cannot determine the 
amount of memory to allocate depending on the message length? :-)

(The header fields already tell the length of the message, so 
allocating 4K buffer for each BGP message (when most messages are much 
smaller than 4K) is probably a waste in many cases.)

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings

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