What defines the "global table"?

I have the "full table" from Tier 1 providers like Level3 (AS3356), Telia (AS1299), NTT, TATA and XO ... they all vary slightly, but are around 500k each now, 499,x (though peaked about 503,650 10-14 days ago)
I have smaller private peers/customers that add another 1k or so routes... and my "show bgp summ" right now is "500795"

It was as high as 504,000 14 days ago.

I do note that "route-views" is at "532470" at the time of this post (2014-09-03 0320 UTC).

... but other than large networks with many customers/peers with non-transit routes ... few networks should have passed the 512k IPv4 TCAM (at 72 bytes, 524,288 route) limit, correct?

I'm not sure how to see Level3's internal BGP table, HE.net is at 508k. (Which providers are past 524k routes?)

The context for my question is we apparently were hit by 512k in that we had 499,760 routes and were at "95% TCAM utilization" per the 7600 router I was working with (2 weeks ago). We had really bad packet loss issues that we could not resolve, and after reboot (we had pre-staged the TCAM memory to 768k) the routes went to 503,650. The increase of 4800 new routes simply on the reboot (confirmed on multiple routers) -- is something I don't understand.

My hypothesis, our 7600/RSP720 in 3CXL mode was lying to us... even though we were at 95% -- the 499k routes was about the max it could support, not the 524,288 is thinks it could take....?