Route flapping is a situation where a route fluctuates repeatedly between being announced, then withdrawn, then announced, then withdrawn, and so on. In this situation, a BGP system will send an excessive number of update messages advertising network reachability information.

Route flapping can cause several different issues. First, each time a new route is learned or withdrawn the BGP best path selection process for that prefix must be executed, which can result in high CPU utilization. If a large enough number of routes are flapping, the BGP process may not be able to converge sufficiently quickly. Second, the route flapping issue can become amplified as it passes from peer to peer. For example, if a router with two peers flaps a route, and those two peers each have 10 peers, the flapping route affects 20 BGP routers.

Route damping is intended to minimize the propagation of update messages between BGP peers for flapping routes. This reduces the load on these devices without unduly impacting the route convergence time for stable routes.

When route damping is enabled, a route is assigned a penalty each time it “flaps” (that is, each time it is announced and then withdrawn within a short interval). If the penalty exceeds 1000 (its suppress value) the route is suppressed.

After the route has been stable for a configured interval (its half-life ) the penalty is reduced by half. Subsequently, the penalty is reduced every five seconds. When the penalty falls below a configured value (its reuse value), the route is unsuppressed.

The penalty applied to a route will never exceed the maximum penalty, which is computed from configured attributes as follows:

• Maximum penalty = reuse * 2^(max-suppress-time / half-life)

While the route is being “damped,” updates and withdrawals for this route from a peer are ignored. This helps to localize the route flapping to a particular peering connection.