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mihaialdea
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Hardware requirements for a high performance traffic shaper

Mon Feb 07, 2011 12:59 am

Hello guys,

My story goes like this... I have a couple of servers running certain apps (I work in a webhosting company), shoutcast, gameservers, webservers, filesharing etc.
I've tried to cut down the abuse rate by limiting the bandwidth they're using. I had an Intel server available so I installed Mikrotik on it. Everything was nice and dandy until I put enough servers behind it that it reached about 500 Mbps and then the clients problem started to pop-up. Loss, lag etc.
I offloaded it and bought an Intel PRO/1000 ET. Long story short, even though it's supposed to work on Mikrotik, it doesn't actually.
Spending half a day tearing my hair off I gave up and I used another server that had PCI-E cards (82575) that were supposed to handle the traffic better because of their RX/TX queues.
The strangest thing happened. On all MT 5 release candidates, I had traffic going through the bridge, the services were running, except a handful of websites (?!?!?!) while others were working just fine. For instance I could ping a machine, I could SSH into it, but the web page wasn't loading. Reverting to 4.16 made everything work like charm. My only concern is that under 4.16 I don't see the Multi CPU checkbox and I'm afraid that my top-notch NICs are useless since the OS is using only one out of the 4 Xeon E5504 cores.
My smokeping graphs look like hell comparing to the graphs of other machines not being filtered. Have a look at the attachment.

And after this boring story here's the actual question...

From your experience, what is a good setup that would allow me to pass about 500-600Mbps / 40k-50k pps / 100k-200k active connections without any issues whatsoever? I need to know your exact setup, MT version etc. because going for top-notch hardware is not an option due to the non-existing or poor/buggy existing driver support. My idea was to buy a PRO/1000 MT which is one or two generations older than the ET but doesn't have the RX/TX queues, however a coleague advised me to go for the newer more expensive ET. I guess I should've sticked to that, maybe I would've been more lucky :-)
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biker
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Re: Hardware requirements for a high performance traffic sha

Mon Feb 07, 2011 5:45 am

i have similar problems and the solution was a 6 core AMD cpu amd a Realtek base card 10/100/1000, this machine have 3000 users and 60 nodes behind without problems. I´m using webproxy, queue, firewall. ( ver 4.16)
 
mihaialdea
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Re: Hardware requirements for a high performance traffic sha

Mon Feb 07, 2011 8:58 am

i have similar problems and the solution was a 6 core AMD cpu amd a Realtek base card 10/100/1000, this machine have 3000 users and 60 nodes behind without problems. I´m using webproxy, queue, firewall. ( ver 4.16)
Could you please give me the exact specs of the machine? What mobo, CPU model, and most important the exact same model of the NIC because I've already paid about 125 EUR for a NIC that it's now collecting dust.
Also, do you happen to know what is the average number of connexions and the average throughput for the setup you've mentioned? In my case it's a mix of high bandwidth usage and a faily large number of active connections.

Many thanks.
 
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Re: Hardware requirements for a high performance traffic sha

Mon Feb 07, 2011 10:25 am

mihaialdea

If you have such a problematic setup running right now, I would be happy to help you by connecting with WinBox and checking for a couple of configuration issues that might have occurred. Contacting me is via Skype. Making sure I pay attention quick enough is by sending $ via paypal.

- Under which exactly version the problems happened? I would use RC8.
- What were the multi-cpu configs? Did you adjust them? I believe that you should have.
- What queues do you use? You mentioned limiting. If the queues aren't right, you would get even worse problems.
- ...

When you notice ANY issue STOP right there, don't even reboot, just please take out a supout.rif file !!! at the moment the problem is happening, and send it to support@mikrotik.com including an exact description of the issue!

Thank you.
 
mihaialdea
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Re: Hardware requirements for a high performance traffic sha

Mon Feb 07, 2011 10:54 am

mihaialdea
If you have such a problematic setup running right now, I would be happy to help you by connecting with WinBox and checking for a couple of configuration issues that might have occurred. Contacting me is via Skype. Making sure I pay attention quick enough is by sending $ via paypal.
Unfortunately I can't do that simply because I'd break my NDA with my employer.
- Under which exactly version the problems happened? I would use RC8.
All RC of version 5 have the "some services not accessible" problems. 4.16 doesn't have this issue. I tend to put this on the buggy 82575 support as this is the main difference between this server and the previous one, other than the irrelevant (from my point of view) different mobo and different CPU (E5504 instead of X3440). The old one was running 5.0rc6 just fine.
- What were the multi-cpu configs? Did you adjust them? I believe that you should have.
I do have a checkbox for multi-CPU under 5.0rcX but I don't have it anywhere in the 4.16. Is 4.16 even capable of using more than one CPU core?
- What queues do you use? You mentioned limiting. If the queues aren't right, you would get even worse problems.
As much as I'd like to, I have to stick with simple queues, and there are 500+ of them. Queue trees are better in respect to the performance, yet simple queues give me better control over the bandwidth alloted to each service. I create queues for each customer and have their total speed limited by defining one queue for his total number of IPs/subnets. If one guy has a VPS with a main IP and then he needs 3 other IPs, then he asks for a /27 subnet, I can put all these in one queue. With queue tree, the limit is set per IP. With queue trees, more IPs = more free bandwidth for him = profit loss for me.
When you notice ANY issue STOP right there, don't even reboot, just please take out a supout.rif file !!! at the moment the problem is happening, and send it to support@mikrotik.com including an exact description of the issue!
I did exactly that. I will keep this topic updated.

Thanks.
 
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Re: Hardware requirements for a high performance traffic sha

Mon Feb 07, 2011 12:35 pm

I suggest your company hire a consultant to deploy MikroTik.

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