Network Working Group Vishwas Manral
Internet Draft Netplane Systems
Russ White
Cisco Systems
Aman Shaikh
Expiration Date: June 2003 University of California
File Name: draft-ietf-bmwg-ospfconv-applicability-01.txt January 2003
Benchmarking Applicability for Basic OSPF Convergence
draft-ietf-bmwg-ospfconv-applicability-01.txt
1. Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
Internet Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
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The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
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2. Abstract
This draft describes the applicability of [2] and similar work which
may be done in the future. Refer to [3] for terminology used in this
draft and [2]. The draft defines the advantages as well as
limitations of using the method defined in [2], besides describing
the pitfalls to avoid during measurement.
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3. Conventions used in this document
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [1].
4. Motivation
There is a growing interest in testing SR-Convergence for routing
protocols, with many people looking at testing methodologies which
can provide information on how long it takes for a network to
converge after various network events occur. It is important to
consider the framework within which any given convergence test is
executed when attempting to apply the results of the testing, since
the framework can have a major impact on the results. For instance,
determining when a network is converged, what parts of the router's
operation are considered within the testing, and other such things
will have a major impact on what apparent performance routing
protocols provide.
This document describes in detail the various benefits and pitfalls
of tests described in [2]. It also explains how such measurements can
be useful for providers and the research community.
5. Advantages of Such Measurement
o To be able to compare the iterations of a protocol implemen-
tation. It is often useful to be able to compare the perfor-
mance of two iterations of a given implementation of a proto-
col to determine where improvements have been made and where
further improvements can be made.
o To understand, given a set parameters (network conditions),
how a particular implementation on a particular device is
going to perform. For instance, if you were trying to decide
the processing power (size of device) required in a certain
location within a network, you can emulate the conditions
which are going to exist at that point in the network and use
the test described to measure the perfomance of several dif-
ferent routers. The results of these tests can provide one
possible data point for an intelligent decision.
If the device being tested is to be deployed in a running
network, using routes taken from the network where the equip-
ment is to be deployed rather than some generated topology in
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these tests will give results which are closer to the real
preformance of the device. Care should be taken to emulate or
take routes from the actual location in the network where the
device will be (or would be) deployed. For instance, one set
of routes may be taken from an abr, one set from an area 0
only router, various sets from stub area, another set from
various normal areas, etc.
o To measure the performance of an OSPF implementation in a
wide variety of scenarios.
o To be used as parameters in OSPF simulations by researchers.
It may some times be required for certain kinds of research
to measure the individual delays of each parameter within an
OSPF implementation. These delays can be measured using the
methods defined in [2].
o To help optimize certain configurable parameters. It may some
times be helpful for operators to know the delay required for
individual tasks so as to optimize the resource usage in the
network i.e. if it is found that the processing time is x
seconds on an router, it would be helpful to determine the
rate at which to flood LSA's to that router so as to not
overload the network.
6. Assumptions Made and Limitations of such measurements
o The interactions of SR-Convergence and forwarding; testing is res-
tricted to events occurring within the control plane. Forwarding
performance is the primary focus in [4] and it is expected to be
dealt with in work that ensues from [5].
o Duplicate LSAs are Acknowledged Immediately. A few tests rely on
the property that duplicate LSA Acknowledgements are not delayed
but are done immediately. However if some implementation does not
acknowledge duplicate LSAs immediately on receipt, the testing
methods presented in [2] could give inaccurate measurements.
o It is assumed that SPF is non-preemptive. If SPF is implemented so
that it can (and will be) preempted, the SPF measurements taken in
[2] would include the times that the SPF process is not running
([2] measures the total time taken for SPF to run, not the amount
of time that SPF actually spends on the device's processor), thus
giving inaccurate measurements.
o Some implementations may be multithreaded or use a
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multiprocess/multirouter model of OSPF. If because of this any of
the assumptions taken in measurement are violated in such a model,
it could lead to inaccurate measurements.
o The measurements resulting from the tests in [2] may not provide
the information required to deploy a device in a large scale net-
work. The tests described focus on individual components of an
OSPF implementation's performance, and it may be difficult to com-
bine the measurements in a way which accurately depicts a device's
performance in a large scale network. Further research is required
in this area.
7. Observations on the Tests Described in [2]
Some observations taken while implementing the tests described in [2]
are noted in this section.
7.1. Measuring the SPF Processing Time Externally
The most difficult test to perform is the external measurement of the
time required to perform an SPF calculation, since the amount of time
between the first LSA which indicates a topology change and the
duplicate LSA is critical. If the duplicate LSA is sent too quickly,
it may be received before the device under test actually begins run-
ning SPF on the network change information. If the delay between the
two LSAs is too long, the device under test may finish SPF processing
before receiving the duplicate LSA. It is important to closely inves-
tigate any delays between the receipt of an LSA and the beginning of
an SPF calculation in the device under test; multiple tests with
various delays might be required to determine what delay needs to be
used to accurately measure the SPF calculation time.
7.2. Noise in the Measurement Device
The device on which measurements are taken (not the device under
test) also adds noise to the test results, primarily in the form of
delay in packet processing and measurement output. The largest source
of noise is generally the delay between the receipt of packets by the
measuring device and the information about the packet reaching the
device's output, where the event can be measured. The following steps
may be taken to reduce this sampling noise:
o Take lot of samples Do we need to explain that further. As Russ
had previously pointed out.
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o Try to take time-stamp for a packet as early as possible.
Depending on the operating system being used on the box, one
can instrument the kernel to take the time-stamp when the
interrupt is processed. This does not eliminate the noise com-
pletely, but at least reduces it.
o Keep the measurement box as lightly loaded as possible.
o Having an estimate of noise can also be useful.
The DUT also adds noise to the measurement. Points (a) and (c)
apply to the DUT as well.
7.3. Gaining an Understanding of the Implementation Improves Measure-
ments
While the tester will (generally) not have access to internal infor-
mation about the OSPF implementation being tested using [2], the more
thorough the tester's knowledge of the implementation is, the more
accurate the results of the tests will be. For instance, in some
implementations, the installation of routes in local routing tables
may occur while the SPF is being calculated, dramatically impacting
the time required to calculate the SPF.
7.4. Gaining an Understanding of the Tests Improves Measurements
One method which can be used to become familiar with the tests
described in [2] is to perform the tests on an OSPF implementation
for which all the internal details are available, such as GateD.
While there is no assurance that any two implementations will be
similar, this will provide a better understanding of the tests them-
selves.
8. Acknowledgements
Thanks to Howard Berkowitz, (hcb@clark.net) and the rest of the BGP
benchmarking team for their support and to Kevin
Dubray(kdubray@juniper.net) who realized the need of this draft.
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9. References
[1] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
Levels", RFC2119, March 1997.
[2] Manral, V., "Benchmarking Methodology for Basic OSPF Convergence",
draft-ietf-bmwg-ospfconv-intraarea, January 2003
[3] Manral, V., "OSPF Convergence Testing Terminiology and Concepts",
draft-ietf-bmwg-ospfconv-term, January 2003
[4] Bradner, S., McQuaid, J., "Benchmarking Methodology for Network
Interconnect Devices", RFC2544, March 1999.
[5] Trotter, G., "Terminology for Forwarding Information Base (FIB)
based Router Performance", RFC3222, October 2001.
10. Authors' Addresses
Vishwas Manral
Netplane Systems
189 Prashasan Nagar
Road number 72
Jubilee Hills
Hyderabad, India
vmanral@netplane.com
Russ White
Cisco Systems, Inc.
7025 Kit Creek Rd.
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
riw@cisco.com
Aman Shaikh
University of California
School of Engineering
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
aman@soe.ucsc.edu
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