Hi,

I have read some of the speed limitations of the RB532/564 with wireless links to be around 23-30 Mbps. I want to use the RB564 as a multiport erth router only with no wireless links at a few locations. Routing will be done between 5 ethernet ports, with total eth bandwidth of approx 20-40MB and up to 8000 packets per second. Can the routerboard 564 handle this kind of traffic reliably? Should I be looking for somthing a little more carrier class?

What if I want to add a wireless card to this setup, would that hurt my ethernet performance?

TIA

I believe Routerboard/MT claimed 300Mbps aggregate bandwidth with the Routerboard 500 series routers used in an ethernet setup.

check the ad - http://www.routerboard.com/PDF/newproducts.pdf

Umm... in that test, they had 4x RB 532's in parallel, each handling 1/4 the traffic - the aggregate was handled by P4's according to the information on the website. Still, that would be an impressive 75Mbps per RB532 on ethernet<>wireless (have never seen anything like that myself on RB532's using Nstreme - probably it was without)

I don't have an "ethernet-only" (non-wireless) figure for RB532s, best to post the question on the "general networking" section. See below on routing complexity though.

The limitation is generally the CPU on the main board - the 564 just adds more ports to the PCI bus, increases the aggregate potential traffic, all of which has to go throught the CPU.
Adding wireless will slow you down. "atheros processing" as I tend to call it, seems to take more CPU cycles than wired ethernet ports, especially if you have security and/or Nstreme enabled.

At the price, I'd suggest buy an RB532 and stress-test it in your application. The degree of routing complexity etc and packet sizes all make a difference to throughput.
If it isn't enough, there are plenty of solutions for faster routers. We build Pent-M and AMD boxes for example, and you can get ~1Gbps through a wired ethernet interface with some of those.

Good luck -

Regards

CableFree Solutions

Hi,

I have read some of the speed limitations of the RB532/564 with wireless links to be around 23-30 Mbps. I want to use the RB564 as a multiport erth router only with no wireless links at a few locations. Routing will be done between 5 ethernet ports, with total eth bandwidth of approx 20-40MB and up to 8000 packets per second. Can the routerboard 564 handle this kind of traffic reliably? Should I be looking for somthing a little more carrier class?

What if I want to add a wireless card to this setup, would that hurt my ethernet performance?

TIA

You will be fine with Ethernet bandwidth to 40mbps as long as you are routing and not doing much in the way of mangles, queues, etc. I would add second unit if you want to add wireless. Otherwise just use a standard PC.

I just completed a test with a routerboard 532 and was getting 97mbps from ether2 to ether3 (udp, tcp, both ways, etc). Connection tracking made a huge difference with smaller udp packets. I will post more details about the testing environment in my other thread. Wireless testing is next. I want to post real numbers with confirmed setup before I say anymore.

Sam

Hi Sam

I'm looking forward to seeing your numbers as my experience so far with Ethernet performance isn't particularly good :S

Richard

I installed all 7 routerboards i had and am only left with 1 on the roof... so testing still has not happened yet. Hopefully next week I will get back to this.

Sam

I installed all 7 routerboards i had and am only left with 1 on the roof... so testing still has not happened yet. Hopefully next week I will get back to this.

Sam

I´ve done some testing, read this:
http://forum.mikrotik.com//viewtopic.ph ... t=532a+564

/Paul