The explosive growth in the Internet is raising fears in some areas about router overload. The Internet Engineering Task Force has started work on overhauling the communications protocol which handles routing across the Internet. The issue needs to be addressed soon. The problem is with the Internet backbone routing table, the master list of network destinations which is stored in routers and used to determine the path from one network to another. In March, entries in that table topped 104,000, compared with 75,000 a year ago.
Nobody knows how big it can grow before routers start crashing from overload.
That provides redundancy and improves reliability of access, but complicates the routing table. The process will take about a year. At least one antivirus specialist foresees an explosion in the bugs this spring. The warning, from the British company MessageLabs, comes as a new worm, called Adore, is squirming into Linux systems. Those projections are based on what MessageLabs recorded in the year 2000.