Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) was always considered a mastodonic routing protocol: huge, complex, hard to understand and configure, and very slow to converge. When Cisco decided to use it to implement layer-3 Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) due to its enormous route carrying capabilities, the slow convergence of BGP became a liability. The Cisco engineers decided to fix the BGP code, resulting in a routing protocol with decent convergence times. In this IP Corner article, Ivan Pepelnjak illustrates how you can optimize BGP convergence in your network without overloading the routers running it.