Currently I’m using a P3/700 with 512MB ram as a PPPoE server with 100 clients being fed from two load balanced cable connections. I’d really love to move this over to a routerboard, but I’m concerned I may come up short for ‘horsepower’. The current P3 setup never shows more than 7% CPU usage normally, or more than 22MB ram in use. Should I be concerned about moving this load to a RB493AH or other Atheros@680 MHz board?
Thanks!
We have a number of 493ah’s as PPPoE servers. We also use some RB600 for PPPoE (and some x86). 100 clients on 493ah would probably be fine, unless you have complicated firewall rules (in which case, the total data rate is probably more important than the number of clients).
As an experiment I tried the worst equipment I had onhand - a Routerboard 750 (300 MHz Atheros, 100mbit CPU interface. Typical load about 30% at peak, with spikes as high as 80%. Actual performance seems fine (actually better than the P3/700 it replaced, oddly enough) I’m going to replace it with a RB750G (680 MHz w/ Gig-E) which should offer much better performance.
I’m actually switching to connectivity via 3x ADSL2 @ 12mbit down, 1mbit up. Potentially 36/3, but I’m mostly concerned about running out of upload (ADSL2 being half duplex, the more upload on the line the more crippled the download gets) capacity more than download. Unless I can talk some sense into the telco and get the lines bonded, I’ll be running NAT with roundrobin load balancing.
Worst case, it just won’t be fast enough and I’ll work out an efficient DC-powered x86 solution. I know it’ll be good enough to hold me over until I get one worked out.
You would be better off using an RB450G since it has healthy 256MB RAM. The RB750G only has 32MB RAM.
I think that’s why the RB450G is much more popular.
Tom
I was going to ask about the 450G - is the performance equal otherwise? I believe the 450G also has voltage and temperature monitoring - that will be handy as this will be a pure-DC site - no UPS status to monitor like my current setup. It will be very nice to be able to measure my backup time in ‘days’ rather than ‘minutes’, though 
Thanks!
the current mikrotik rbs dont come close to a proper routerpc workingwise and speed