Hi i have a mikrotik CRS 226 that has been running for months without any downtime that is rackmounted in a portable rack full of other networking gear. There is plenty of airflow and the cables neatly arranged but the rack doesnt have active cooling. Although temperatures Never go beyond 50C from system health i have been getting timeouts every now and than. Everyday each device connected to the CRS only for switching times out a few times for both LAN and WAN.
I have tested all devices along the routes from the networked devices all the way to the internet and checking on ISP gateway and even netwatch from the router also shows the CRS timing out often between a few seconds up to a few minutes a day. Im using a CCR1036 as the router which doesnt have any issues with connections. This is very evident since leaving winbox opened to both the CRS and the CCR times out every day regardless if it is using IP or MAC to connect.
If i connect to the CCR directly the connection doesnt drop. I have had similar issues with other routerboards that use switch chips and also performance issues on switch chips with other routerboards. On the RB450G doing bandwidth testing would only give a total of 1Gb/s for all directions which is only 20% of the maximum potential switch forwarding capacity so even with 5 devices connected switching it doesnt do more than 1Gb/s in total. The CCR hasnt been on
I havent managed to verify the performance on the CRS and i have set it up in a very lean way. Using it as a dumb switch with no rules anywhere and running only what is necessary for the OS doesnt solve the problem.
I get that active ventilation will help but it seems like that even for below 50C timeouts happen. Rebooting the switch and updating routerOS on it doesnt help either. I seem to get very poor performance out of switch chips on routerboards.