Queue Trees and Bandwidth/CPU ratio

RouterOS General
1

This could be one of those ‘how long is a piece of string’ questions, but I’d thought I’d ask before investing the time and money in inappropriate hardware.

I am planning on using a pair of Via Epia PD6000 systems in VRRP to shape a 8Mbit link. What I would like to know is 600MHz/256Mb DDR adequate to shape 8Mbit to approximately 50+ clients, each client with their own QoS requirements?

Reasons for selecting the above hardware is its availability, cost, power usage, size and fanless design.

2

Celeron@2.6 GHz, 256 MB RAM, with about 148 queue tree rules, has about 10% CPU Usage @ 8MBit/s, 30% at 25 MBit/s and about 50% at 40 MBit/s… Packet flow is about 2000 packets/s @8MBit/s, 4000 @ 25 Mbit, 6000 @40 MBit/s…

Think about Pentium 4 1 MB L2 cache, one of this @ 1.7 GHz has about 4% @ 8Mbit/s