Hi, we are using RouterOS for x86 as our main router with NAT and IP filtering / accounting. It’s some kind of intel Core gen2 with 4cores and 2,5Ghz base clock as reported in routeros resources. The CPU load is between 10-20%. Currently we have about 500Mbit WAN speed and the router is also routing some intranet through that site. We have 10g switches and two of several sites directly connected are connected using 4gbps radios. All the routing goes between VLANS on one gbit TRUNK connection to main 10g switch. There was no urge to upgrade the gbit port until recently. Question is. Does RouterOS effectively use x86 multicpu on routing / filtering ? If 20% of cpu is used, is it that 80% is free or it’s in fact only 5% on 4-core CPU ?
As we reload whole filter list each day according to our customer’s payment status, is there any cloudrouter who can handle about 500 config-lines to be altered each day regarding of NAND / SSD wear ?
I plan to build new x86 machine on some low power ZEN 3 cpu with sfp+ network card next year. But I would use a cloudrouter if it would handle frequent config changes. It’s pity that routeros does not support unsaved configuration in RAM like cisco switches, or it does ? using API ? That would save the day since the base configuration is permanent and we only reload access list every day.
Thank you for any suggestions 
ROS generally spreads tasks across available CPU cores with a few limitations (e.g. BGP updates will only happen on single CPU; packets belonging to single TCP/UDP connection will all be handled by same CPU core, …). You can check to see if all CPU cores are utilized by running CPU profiler (Tools → Profile → CPU: all). Information from System → Resources shows average CPU load per core (so it’s always in the range 0-100% regardless the number of cores) but that hides the limitations I was mentioning previously.
That’s great @mkx. Did not known about the cpu profiling. Seems indeed that firewall span nicely across the cpu cores. In that case we would probably not replace the machine at all and just add 10g ethernet. Thanks.
Are you running ROS x86 or CHR? ROS x86 doesn’t have support for many NIC types, so you may have issues finding some which are actually supported. Support for 10Gb NICs should be much better in ROS v7 (currently in beta, no ETA on stable version) and in CHR (where VM abstraction layer takes care of hardware drivers).
ROS. The 10g nic upgrade is not a must for now right now. It’s more like a nice to have feature to keep entertained We have bought some Intel X520-DA1 before which should have support.