CCR - BGP performance

RouterOS Forwarding Protocols
1

Hi All

was someone already able to test the BGP performance of the CCRs using full internet routing tables?
I wonder how well it could handle route flaps on a 1 Gig Internet connection.

  • Mat
2

Im canging a juniper j6350 to a ccr on Monday (if I recive it).
I will have a global bgp routing table to it and we’ll se then. :smiley:

3

Thanks for your reply!
I’m very interrested to see your results. What do you plan to monitor? I would look at the different CPU Cores to see if the load gets balanced proprerly and how fast the routing table gets copied to the CCR.

If work permits, I will test it by myself within the next two weeks. We’ve got a Brocade CER (65 Mpps) at the Data Center which has some free ports and could be used to “stress test” the CCR. :laughing:

I’m very curious if the CCR can handle that or if it will almost die like others would @ 1 Gig.

  • Mat
4

I will test that it is working. :smiley:

No, but seriously, I have had some trouble using the vrf part of 6.x ros, and im not quite sure if the routing is good enough to be used in production yet. I will try to stress test, (maybe to my j6350 and/or my zte zxr10 8902) for eBGP and to my 1100AH2X for iBGP, combinded with the global routing table from my 1gig ip transit. I put it in production, so its depends on how it impact customer. :smiley:

5

Sure.
I already tested BGP on the CCR using a RB1100AHx2 so I can say it works in general. :sunglasses:

I won’t put it in production now. I will just set it up as an iBGP peer to see how it performs when a powerful router sends the full table. So I can plan how it can be used in our Network. We won’t use it as a border router anyway, but we’ve got some GigE links between our POPs and because of that we need it to be able to handle this load. We used Cisco routers in the past that could handle the traffic well but as soon as routes begin to flap, they almost died. That’s why I’m a bit cautious now. From my tests, I know the CCR can handle multiple Gigs very well but what about BGP…? That’s also why I will have a look at the ping times while the routing table gets (re)built on the CCR. A router that generates a delay of 100ms+ or even worse begins to drop packets, while it updates its routing table, is just useless to us.

You see, I want to go more into detail. But I would appreciate your results. :smiley:

  • Mat
6

I just found a video on youtube on which someone sent 4 full feeds to the CCR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ7qQCJI8pA
It looks like the load doesn’t get balanced over multiple cores. This is what I suspected. It’s too bad that we can’t use the full potential of this CPU.

7

This tell to less to conclude annything other than mikrotik is working to get a 100% systeem running. its still to be consider as a beta test system.

8

I’m not 100% sure what you meant, but we do not complain about low performance we’re just testing. We know it’s in beta. I was a bit disappointed to see that the CCR isn’t really faster than the RB1100AH (at this point). I’m sure it will get better…

9

Mikrotik are furiously working away on a new routing engine that will make use of massively multicore architectures like the Tilera processors in the CCR.

No ETA from them yet, but hopefully soon :slight_smile:

10

I’ve got some test results:

  • It takes about 30 sec. to load 400k prefixes (one core of the CPU @ 100%)
  • MD5 passwords don’t work
  • As soon as I get more than about 200k prefixes, the “Routes” windows doesnt show all filter options and routes
11

" MD5 passwords don’t work"
With latest RouterOS version MD5 should work

“As soon as I get more than about 200k prefixes, the “Routes” windows doesnt show all filter options and routes”
It is made so that bandwidth is not flooded with enormous amount of winbox data to display route updates.

12

I’m running RC10 built on 15 Feb. and it definitely doesn’t work in this version. I’ve got a Cisco and a Brocade router connected to this CCR and both session don’t work with MD5.
I will update to the most recent version of RouterOS and test again.
Btw. I’ve got a 1100AH running on 5.22 which peers also with this two routers mentioned above and it runs MD5 with no problem.

I thought it’s because of that. But at some point I wasn’t able to filter on routing protocol, etc. Only Dst. Address was visible. At the moment it works. Well, like I wrote above, I will update to the most recent version and keep an eye on this.

Thanks mrz for your reply. It’s good to know that we get “heard”. :slight_smile:

Edit:

I just saw that I’m running the latest Version of RouterOS.
You are right mrz it’s not a Bug it’s just how it works when you’ve got a lot of routes. It needs getting used to.
The problem is you need to know the subnet (and size of it) you search for. For example: You can’t search for “192.168.0.1” if you don’t know that this IP is in “192.168.0.0/24”. On Ciscos I can run “show ip route 192.168.0.1” or “show ip bgp 192.168.0.1” and I get the right prefix. Or am I just using it wrong?

13

Hey Samsung

were you able to test BGP?
My CCR is currently running 3 Sessions to upstream routers and 1 Session to a downstream router. Uptime is almost a week and I’ve seen no problems so far.

  • Mat
14

Hi Mat,

thanks for sharing!

Your BGP Sessions are up with Fulltables? I plan to use Mikrotik in my Edge with 3x Uplinks, but i miss 10 GbE Support over SFP+.

15

still the vrf issue. so its not possible for me to start full test.

I have a global ebgp routing table, and one internal ibgp and see no problem to that.

16

Hi raz

I’m running one full table, one part table and one table from the local IX (~50k). The downstream router gets the “mix” of all tables.
But I don’t see any problems to run 3 full tables. It’s just a matter of ram and at the moment I’ve got ~3.25G free of the 4G installed in the CCR, so there’s room to grow. If not, we could upgrade the ram.

I also think the CCR needs some more carrier grade features like I mentioned in another thread, but it’s a platform with a lot of potential.

The only negative point I see so far is, that the CCR can only use one core to process BGP. Compared to a 1100AH or 1100AHx2 (which can also only use one core), it’s not much faster if it’s any faster at all. Sure, the positive side effect is that the packets running trough the CCR don’t get delayed, which is what a carrier would expect from such devices, but it would be nice if the CCR could use multiple cores for BGP to speed up this process. If it could use a user configurable amount of cores would be awsome of course. :slight_smile:

  • Mat
17

Hi Mat,

thanks for your Answer! If im buy the Mikrotik i will start with 16 GB RAM, to be safe. And RAM is currently cheap.

With the Prefixes, im sure Mikrotik make here in future a Update to optimize this Feature, maybe we should send an Feature Request to their Support?

Regards,

– raz

18

16 GB should absolutely be sufficent. :laughing:

19

But, if there was more corses to do the bgp. would it be speeded up? Whats really nice, is that each port, don’t share internal recourses like the 1xxx series. 1Gig strigt into the core (kernel).

20

Sure would it speed up the building of the routing table. Especially when more peers with full routing tables are connected to the CCR.