Because BGP speakers often carry thousands of prefixes, convergence can, and will, be affected in some of these prefixes transition between the up and down states. This in turn leads to instability and can result in packet loss and poor performance. To mitigate against flapping prefixes, RFC 2439 defined route flap dampening which has three major goals:
- It provides a mechanism to reduce router processing load caused by unstable routes
- It prevents sustained route fluctuations, i.e. routes going up and down
- It provides stability without sacrificing convergence time for well-behaved routes The content below this message is for members only.