I have 2 subnets

192.168.4.0/24 = servers
192.168.8.0/24 = user pcs & laptops

I need to get fast routing at gigbabit speed between these 2 subnets. Currently with servers on ether10 and users on ether9 I get ~35MB/s from the file server to my PC which isn't making the most of the Gigabit networking. I have an HP 2810 L2 switch divided into VLANs and trunking to another 2810 switch in another room which also has members of the same VLANs.

I've been playing around but can't seem to get it work so I did this:

ether1 is management, other ports are various WAN links or do not need gigabit speed between.

I've configured ether2 on the RB1200 as master and made ether 3 and 4 slaves.
Added 2 rules to switch config:
ether3, dest 192.168.8.0/24 --> new dst port = ether4
ether4, dest 192.168.4.0/24 --> new dst port = ether3

Do I need another rule to send other traffic to the switch CPU or master? Or am I doing it all wrong?

How are you testing the throughput to get 35mb?

How are you testing the throughput to get 35mb?

Whilst not using the RB1200 switch features a Windows file copy of a large ISO image from the file server to my local hard drive averages 35MB/s.

Both ends are more than capable of faster, both have Gigabit NICs and fast hard drives. The limiter appears to be the RB1200 which is between the subnets. Doing the same file transfer to a limited capability VM on the same subnet as the file server is ~80MB/s.

I would be interested to see the results to the same server with it being on the same subnet, bypassing the router.

I would be interested to see the results to the same server with it being on the same subnet, bypassing the router.

I see what you're getting at, I repeated a set of tests on the same subnet, on different subnets and with different machines. I found some faulty cabling, wildly differing results and many other things but have somewhat improved my best result to 40-50MB/s through the MikroTik, 80-90MB/s just through the HP switch.

Lets just back up a bit, what is the *theoretically* best way of linking 2 IP subnets like this, am I better using 2 regular ethernet interfaces on the MikroTik as I am now or is making use of the switch features on ether1-5 something that can be better?

I've spent whole day testing RB1200, because my configuration was very slow, unexpectedly. I found out that ports 9 and 10 are very slow, especially when data are routed from one of them to switch part (ether1-5) with "only-hardware-queue" set as interface queue - that results to about 150 Mbps only! (using iperf, 5 connection, 1 MB TCP window size)

My recommendation is: don't use ports 9 and 10 and set "ethernet-default" queue type for ether1-5. With these modifications I got about 880 Mbps, which is speed limit of my computers - it means routing was as fast as direct connection through switch (with only few firewall rules, no connection tracking, nor NAT, nor queue tree). Using connection tracking and NAT I've got about 400 Mbps.

I tried to raise CPU and memory frequency from default 1000/400 and it really help, especially with 1066/533. Is it safe to set these values? Will the system stay stable?

zervan,
which version of ROuterOS and which routerboot (firmware) did you use during your test?

which version of ROuterOS and which routerboot (firmware) did you use during your test?

The newest stable: 5.17, 2.38