My main mikrotik bridge is about 95% avg utilization so its time to upgrade.
The current hardware is an intel pentium d 2.8ghz server ( dual core , old intel netburst architecture).
I’m about to buy a intel Xeon 2.66ghz ( dual core and new intel core 2 duo architecture) .
Anyone have an idea how good the these intel core 2 duo performs on mikrotik and will worth change for that new processor? i’m thing about 30% cpu utilization gain.
Another question is if a better network card will help the cpu? changing from a generic pci gigabit to a intel pciexpress gigabit nic?
We are running RouterOS on DELL power edge server 1U with 2x dual core Xeon 2.4 GHz CPUs, the server is used as traffic shaper in a bridge mode, and forwards 500 Mbit/s through it. With 30 mangle rules ad 42 queue tree rules, and the CPU utilisation is around 30%, regarding the netwrok cards we are using broadcom gigabit cards integrated in the servers motherboard, but indeed good cards play ignificnt role in performance.
i´m now planning the upgrade date to early next week.
just put a dual intel gigabit card but its pci the actual server is used as traffic shaper in a bridge mode, 180 simple queues, about 40 mangle rules and 20 queue tree rules, moving 150mbits traffic.
if you can - go for PCIe, as PCI bus is limited to 1Gbit for whole bus, and even 1 Gbit interface will saturate it fully, but as we know, a lo to fother things are connected t PCI buss, so as the result you will get max 300Mbit of traffic over your Gbit interfaces.
currently the average use is about 130mbits downstream and 70mbits upstream.
its being used for bandwidth management, we have about 117000 connections in connection tracking. and 160simple queues ( for bussiness consumers networks.)
you didn’t asked but yes we cant use PCQ becouse each costumer have a lot of individual settings like max-limit, limit at, priorities and a lot of diferent bandwitdh requirements, so pcq doesnt work for our business model.
There are many variants of Core 2 Duo and Dual Core (they are different); which one are you looking at? For routing applications we are I/O heavy; so you’d benefit from a CPU with a faster bus speed (1033 or 1333) with more cache over more Mhz.
On going from PCI to PCI-e; you would have considerably more available bandwidth. However bridging uses considerably more CPU than just routing; so you might still see high CPU but it should be more responsive as you’d have less of an I/O bottleneck to wait on.
PCI-x or PCI-e (Express)? As others have stated; there is a huge difference and they are not interchangeable. Many new server class machines only come with PCI-e, unless you order a legacy backplane.
Just changed the server, same time and same traffic yesterday the cpu but with the old ml 110 g3 pentium d 2.8ghz were about 40% now its about 17% , i will post news about the cpu usage at peak internet usage that’s the old cpu was 89 90%..
the actual server is used as traffic shaper in a bridge mode, 180 simple queues, about 40 mangle rules and 20 queue tree rules, moving 150mbits traffic.