Hi, does anyone know what are the limitations on switching capacity of the RouterOS?

I have set up a test system used for switching the network. Is build on a Intel S5000VSA server motherboard and contains 2ports on Intel PRO/1000 EB and 8ports with Intel PRO/1000 PT gigabit network cards. This gives me 20Gbps in fullduplex theoretical capacity. The hardware should be able to function in Gbps's.

I am running RouterOS ver.2.9 as a Virtual Machine under VMWARE Workstation 6.5.1 which runs under Windows2003. The physical network ports are bridged to the virtual machine with RouterOS.

I have bridged all 10ports under RouterOS to "bridge1". I have assigned a DHCP client to the "bridge1" so that I get a IP address.

My problem is that when i test the bandwidth with the Mikrotik Bandwidth test tool for Windows. Where I let it test connection to the IP address of the "bridge1" from several systems. I get the overall bandwidth only around 200Mbps Tx and 100Mbps Rx. This is very far from the theoretical 20Gbps fullduplex.

As I am a networking amateur I must be doing something wrong or understanding something in a wrong way.

My question is. What is the switching capability of the RouterOS? Is the RouterOS able to give me couple of Gbps's of bandwidth? If yes. What do I have to do to get them?
Also I am not sure if it's proper done when I am testing the bandwidth to the IP address of the "bridge1" interface. Maybe I should test the bandwidth from another systems going through my switch system.

The switching capability is limited to hardware with switching chips for one. So you are using CPU. Second, you do not allow direct access to the hardware in question since you are runing virtulized, so you are dedicating the system to RouterOS. Overall, there are quite a bit of resources used by the guest OS, that not only use resourcese, but also limit the overall ability of RouterOS to do its job. I will say this though, that if you are setting up that machine with so many NICs in a bridge, just install a swtich!

The host system CPU load is max. 30%. For some reason the RouterOS shows the CPU load 100%.

I wanted to use this scenario with RouterOS running as virtual machine because I need also other stuff to be done by the system for which I need Windows. But windows is kind of crap when working with more network ports doing a simple switching and I had many problems with links not detecting that there is connection which are gone when I use RouterOS as a virtual machine taking care of the networking.
So now I am just trying to figure out what is the limitation of the bandwidth.
As I am just playing around I will try to install the RouterOS as the main OS and will see if the performance will be better.
So far it seems it's a limitation whether of the virtual machine or of the RouterOS.

Will see tomorrow today I am going home already

Sounds like the VM is only giving so much time to RouterOS, if it is seeing 100% cpu.

vmware will only give you 100-300mbps of performance over their virtualized nics. if you need more, don't use virtualization and run routeros on the hardware directly.

And why stick on RouterOS 2.9?

Any way, I have seen that routerboards like 433AH and 493AH,
not to mention here the RB1000, do far better job than RouterOS
based on a Pentium IV computer. I have had no chance to compare
with any latter motherboards.

How about using a switch to switch, and a router to route, instead of using something called Router OS to switch?

You can get away with crossing over on the lower end, but when things get demanding, it requires choosing the best products for the job.

So I have installled pure RouterOS 4.3 on the system.

The bandwidth I have get was 800-900Mbps. Still far away Gbps units. As the system is doing much better job under Windows(haven't tested all the 10ports but have have had earlier around 4Gbps full duplex trafic) I suppose it must be something within the RouterOS. Might not like that much the Hardware or maybe some settings.

I know it's much better to have a proper switch, but you know how that is..I have for testing purposes around 10 Intel S5000 series or S5500 series motherboards based servers and 2 Intel MFSYS25..but no switch ironically

It's always like this