2025-08-03
Pings between two directly-connected Chateau5Gax though having an average latency of 1.5 ms have peaks of up to 15 ms. This is unexpected for a quad-core GHz CPU router. Why?. What am I missing?. How can I improve this?
Regards, Chris.
That’s not usual. Normally <1ms is expected. Btw traceroute (MT’s equivalent of MTR) is much nicer to look at 
Router capacity doesn’t really correlate with ping times. Routers are built to bulk-forward packets, and for this they queue up packets before waking the cpu. In lots of situations - strange as it might seem - you actually get much better ping times running a 10Mbps bandwidth test beside it. It’s quite often faster to foward ping packets than to generate or consume them.
Ping, smokeping and the others are more useful for “getting a feel” for when things start stressing out, instead of using it as a quantitative tool.
Also, see if setting cpu frequency to the nominal max instead of auto. Freq switching can wreak havoc with networking. I don’t know why they bother, there are no actual power savings. (You’ll run into device-mode, if you haven’t already.)
Thankyou for your response, much appreciated. coincidentally I do have a continuous 10 Mbps FDX data stream that does have much better mean latencies (130 us) but also has the 15 ms peak latencies.
I did see the CPU frequency changing (using System/resources); mainly 1320 MHz but every few seconds jumping for about one second to 1800, 1440, 1200, or 864 MHz.
Eventually I did manage to vhange the "device-mode" allowing me to change the CPU-frequency from "auto" up to the 1800 MHz maximum. This has dropped the peak latencies a bit, down to about 10 ms which is still dissapointing.
I am trying to set up a test bed that can check a 5G cellular link allegedly providing the sub-millisecond latencies promised by the 5G URLLC service.
Please let me know if you have any other "tweaks" to try on my Chateau5G routers, or any other routers I should look at.
Best wishes,
Chris
I don't really think there's much to be done. 5G (or any mobile) provider specifies thing as "up to xxx (notes 1,5,21,55 apply)", so yeah.
Mikrotik in the past had problems with doing stuff that essentially "froze" the cpu, like refreshing diagrams on the built-in lcd. Make sure that you disable all such functions that may make use of any sort or busywait.
And how would a non-guru be able to do find out what to do?
Do Microtik folk read these posts?
No. At least not everyone and not everywhere around this place.
You see, this is mostly a user forum.
Users helping other users.
If you want their attention, file a support ticket.
Thankyou, much appreciated.