Bandwidth speed vs. Router CPU speed

RouterOS General
1

Hello everyone!

I wonder if there is an rough/approximate formula to tell what bandwdith a particular type of PC can ensure with RouterOS? I have a setting where two MT routers are connected via switch to one another and to the ISP. When I try data transfer from a PC behind one router to a PC behind the other, I get approx. 21 Mbps in Task Manager > Networking and 19 mbps in RouterOS > Interface > Traffic. Both routers are P166, 32/48 Mb RAM, regular and IDE flash HDDs, all NICs are Realtek 8139x, router CPU load is 65%/100% during transfer. Is CPU speed the bottleneck? What CPU should be enough for 100 Mbps without encryption and alike extras?

For connection to a slow ISP it is not an issue but to communicate directly between two networks, this feels a little slow ;=).

Any ideas / comments?

Bruno

2

Yup, you need faster CPU.

Eugene

3

look in the post threads about Nstream as this deals with higher bandwidth applications and has alot of info about processors…

4

Realtek card is using up all your CPU. Problem will be reduced if you upgrade to better cards (I recommend Intel, others recommend 3Com).

5

switch to intel etherexpress or 3com 905b . They should work with your 166mhz and due to them using fewer interrupts you will see a lower cpu usage and higher transfer .

6

Thanks everyone!

Bruno