The MPLS WG Archive

[David Charlap <david.charlap@marconi.com>]

Curtis Villamizar wrote:
> 
> I was one of those people.  Doing the IP destination lookup is no
> longer a limiting factor for modern routers.

Depends on the speed.  If you up the number and type of interfaces so
that your fabric has to forward billions or trillions of packets per
second, you will once again find differences in how the two forwarding
engines (IP destination vs. label) perform.

Regardless of how fast the chips run, an IP best-match lookup is an
inherently more complicated operation than the integer-matching lookup
required by something that forwards based on label (or VC or DLC).

-- David