Abstract. A PIM-SM-built multicast tree must be restructured/recovered when the underlying unicast routing tables change. In this article we describe the PIM-SM recovery mechanisms and evaluate the recovery performance, showing its dependence on a range of network and session parameters. Our results show that a significant recovery performance improvement is possible if the multicast recovery is immediately triggered when the unicast routing state changes. Furthermore, our results show that a substantial packet loss can be caused by non-reductive, “benign” events in the network, such as an addition of a new link.