Bruce Davie published a nice article explaining why it makes little sense to use an algorithm that’s supposedly faster than Dijkstra’s in link-state routing protocols.

Other interesting data points from the article (and linked presentations):

• People are running (a few) thousands of routers in a single area
• Running Dijkstra’s algorithm on an emulated network with 2000 nodes took 100 msec… in 2003 (page 18 of this NANOG presentation).

It turns out (as I expected) that all the noise about the need for new routing protocols we were experiencing a few years ago was either due to bad implementations or coming from nerds looking for new toys to play with.