We just starting out using MT boxes as Wifi AP’s. I’ve played around with PPOE and it seems to be a good way of controlling authorization, isolating traffic, etc. The question I have is in regards to overhead. I’m aware that each PPOE session will eat a little bit of ram. Is there any major penalties in regards to bandwidth or processing power? Any thoughts would be appreciated before I dive into this.
Eric
I am not sure about Mikrotik, but there can be quite big overhead on vanilla Linux systems, check this link. This really depends on the PPPoE implementaion, if it is running in kernel or user space. Someone from Mikrotik should really answer, but maybe you can test CPU utilization with and withoug PPPoE.
That was an interesting link. I noticed that it ommitted kernel 2.6 which I think the RouterOS 2.9 is based on. I’m pretty sure that 2.6 has some major optimization code for PPPoE.
Either way, the little bit that we’ve tested shows PPPOE not consuming alot of CPU. And that is currently with a 2.8.26 build. But then again, we don’t have very many people on it.
Eric