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