Sorry to get back to basics, but I have not followed all the Flow Label discussions or read all the drafts. I have read
draft-ietf-6man-flow-ecmp-00.txt draft-ietf-6man-flow-update-01.txt pretty carefully and I still don't quite understand what real problem we are trying to solve - and thus, whether the proposed changes actually help or are a no op. Is there a document that speaks to this? Question: I understand the value of ECMP type load balancing. But how much of a problem is it today (with IPv6) if the Flow Label is not used? If you hash on just the 5 tuple (excluding the flow label), you get (I assume) the equivalent of what you have in IPv4 today. Why is that not good enough? Also, splitting flows across different links would seem to have value primarily if you hvae a single source (or rather single src/dest pair) generating a *lot* of traffic/flows, i.e., so that if you split traffic from that source/dest pair, you see measurable load-splitting. Is this happening in practice today? Can operators please speak to this? And if it is a problem, is it primarily with tunneled traffic (where the tunnel aggregates many flows), or is it really between individual pairs of nodes that are sending a *lot* of traffic to each other? Are there examples of this? (I'm not necessarily opposed to this work going forward, but I'm not entirely convinced we are solving a real problem. Help me please.) Thomas -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------