We’re having a strange problem with the ping times to one of our Mikrotik routers. It’s an old x86 box running RouterOS 2.9.51 that we’ve had in place for quite some time with little trouble. The router has three ethernet interfaces: gw, which connects it to the 'net, WAN, which connects to a Tranzeo radio that shoots a wireless signal down the street, and local, which, as you can imagine, connects to the local switches for that building.
Recently, however, we’ve been getting complaints about poor internet performance. I pinged the router and consistently got ping times between 200 and 500 ms and a few timeouts. The weird thing is if I disable the local interface, the ping times improve after a few seconds and stay between 1 and 30 ms for as long as local is disabled. The ping times stay good for several seconds after I re-enable local, but climb right back up pretty quickly.
Has anyone else run into a problem like this? I’m wondering if there might be a problem with that nic, or with the port on the first switch local is plugged in to. Either that, or there’s some issue with that version of RouterOS that I haven’t run into before.
A simple queue was added in Winbox to throttle the ip address of one user, and apparently 0.0.0.0 ended up in the queue as well. This had the effect of throttling everyone down and caused some serious network congestion. Disabling that entry fixed the problem immediately.