This value sets how many equal-cost IPv6 routes the router will actually use simultaneously when IPv6 load sharing is enabled, capping how widely traffic gets spread even if more equal-cost paths exist. An administrator tunes this based on how many genuinely good, equally-costed paths they have and want in active use, since setting it lower than the number of available paths leaves some candidate routes unused for load sharing. For example, setting this value to 4 on a router that has six equal-cost IPv6 routes to a destination means only four of those six paths are actually used to share the load.