IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco 8000 Series Routers, IOS XR Releases

Route-scale profiles

Updated: August 12, 2026

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Explains how a route-scale profile reallocates hardware resources to increase IPv4 and IPv6 FIB capacity. Covers capacity changes, classification tradeoffs, configuration, and restoration.

A route-scale profile is a hardware resource allocation that

increases the number of IPv4 and IPv6 routes that the FIB can store
reassigns existing router resources to the forwarding database, and
reduces the resources available to some packet-classification features.

Table 1. Feature History Table
Feature Name	Release Information	Description
Route Scale Improvements	Release 7.9.1	This feature enables you to increase the number of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) entries supported for IPv4 traffic from 2 million to 3 million and IPv6 traffic from 0.5 million to 1 million. The increased FIB entries allow the router to route more traffic streams. It also helps the router to achieve a faster switch or process-switch forwarding scenario by eliminating the frequent need for route cache maintenance due to fewer route entries in the FIB database. This feature introduces the hw-module profile route scale command.

Route-scale capacity and resource allocation

Use the capacity values to evaluate the route-scale profile before you enable it.

Table 2. Route-scale resource changes
Traffic type	Default FIB capacity	Increased FIB capacity	Classification resource reduction
IPv4	2 million entries	3 million entries	512 ternary content-addressable memory entries
IPv6	0.5 million entries	1 million entries	256 ternary content-addressable memory entries

Restrictions of route-scale profiles

Account for reduced packet-classification resources before you enable route-scale improvements.

The restriction affects security access control lists, quality-of-service access control lists, BGP FlowSpec, and local packet transport services.

The profile reallocates hardware resources from packet classification to the FIB.

IPv4 expansion reduces available classification space by 512 entries. IPv6 expansion reduces it by 256 entries.

The Cisco 8010 Series Routers do not support this feature.

Configure the route-scale profile

Increase IPv4 capacity to 3 million entries and IPv6 capacity to 1 million entries.

Before you begin

Confirm that the router supports route-scale improvements and that reduced packet-classification resources are acceptable.

Procedure

Configure the route-scale profile in global configuration mode.

Example:

Router# configure
Router(config)# hw-module profile route scale lpm tcam-banks
Router(config)# commit

Reload all locations.
Example:
```
Router# reload location all
```

Display the running configuration.

Example:

Router# show running-config
hw-module profile route scale lpm tcam-banks

What to do next

To restore default capacity, remove the profile with the no form of the command and reload all locations.

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