The first RIP implementations sent their distance vector exactly every 30 seconds. This worked well in most networks, but some researchers noticed that routers were sometimes overloaded because they were processing too many distance vectors at the same time [FJ1994]_. They collected packet traces in these networks and found that after some time the routers' timers became synchronized, i.e. almost all routers were sending their distance vectors at almost the same time. This synchronization of the transmission times of the distance vectors caused an overload on the routers' CPU but also increased the convergence time of the protocol in some cases. This was mainly due to the fact that all routers set their timers to the same expiration time after having processed the received distance vectors. `Sally Floyd`_ and `Van Jacobson`_ proposed in [FJ1994]_ a simple solution to solve this synchronization problem. Instead of advertising their distance vector exactly after 30 seconds, a router should send its next distance vector after a delay chosen randomly in the [15,45] interval :rfc:`2080`. This randomization of the delays prevents the synchronization that occurs with a fixed delay and is now a recommended practice for protocol designers.
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