Henk,

On Wed, Nov 07, 2018 at 03:06:45PM +0100, Henk Smit wrote:
> Jeffrey Haas wrote on 2018-11-06 05:20:
> 
> >I'm ambivalent of the transport, but agree that TCP shouldn't be
> >the default
> >answer.
> 
> I picked TCP because every router has a working TCP implementation.

Having just done a history lesson on BGP for NLNOG, it's sort of fun to see
this. :-)

> >My concerns that I tried raising via jabber summarize roughly as
> >follows:
> >- TCP is prone to interesting backpressure issues, typically as a
> >result of
> >  packet loss or slow receivers.
> 
> If a receiver is slow, that's the same situation as when IS-IS on the
> neighbor is slow. Retransmissions happen. Retransmissions with 10589
> flooding are fixed time (5 seconds). (I guess some modern
> implementations
> do something smarter). So convergence would have been impacted with
> native flooding too.

I guess my question to those who live in IGP land is how often is this a
problem?  In the case of an IGP, the backpressure means you have databases
that are out of sync and end up with bad forwarding.  

> Note that our proposal only does TCP over directly connected routers.
> I'm sorry to say I have little experience with behaviour of BGP in
> real networks. Where did you observe these backpressure issues ? EBGP
> or iBGP ?

Both iBGP and eBGP.  The two general issues are slow receivers (scale) or
responses to dropped packets.

The general experiment I recommend to people trying to do this sort of thing
is take your TCP stream of choice, pace it according to your transmission
needs, and then drop 5-30% of the packets.  Observe what happens.

TCP recovers fine.  But the hiccups can do bad things when timeliness is
expected.  For example, 3 second hold times for aggressive BGP peering may
time out.

I guess I'd restate my concern as "for this application, ensure that you're
okay with the results of stalled trasnmission".  Effectively, see the answer
to the question I asked above about native behaviors.

> Also note that in BGP, every update packet over every peering has
> significance.
> If one gets delayed, it slow down overall convergence.

This is true.  It's usually survivable due to hop-by-hop forwarding in BGP's
case, but it can still do bad things.

>  In ISIS
> flooding, a router
> will receive multiple copies of the same LSP. So if one
> TCP-connection is slow,
> the router might still receive the same LSPs over other paths. And
> the impact
> on overall convergence is likely to be less.

This, I think, is a better point addressing my concerns.  Thanks.

> Of course, this implies that routers flood over more than 1 or 2
> interfaces. If
> we do one of the flooding-reduction proposals, I hope we'll end up
> with a situation
> where we have 3 or 4 redundant flooding topologies, so that routers
> will still
> receive LSPs quickly over other topologies when the primary topology
> has problems.

:-)


-- Jeff

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