According to Mikrotik specs the CCR2116 has the same CPU as the CCR2216. As I understand it the CCR2216 have a very powerful switch chip that makes the difference between the two routers (except for the physical interface differences of course)

Is there anyone that has compared the performance difference between these two routers when doing eBGP session with full routing table?

I am currently using a CCR2116 as eBGP and receiving around 140 000 routes. Peak traffic is around 2Gbit/s. The router is a pure BGP router (not used for any other network functions). Only RAW firewall rules (no connection tracking).

Would be interesting to know if anyone has some practical experience with this and can provide insight in the performance differences. I am thinking of receiving a full routing table from two different providers and also upgrading capacity to 10Gbit/s.

The performance difference in these comes when you're using L3HW offloading. The CPU is going to handle the same BGP tasks similarly.

I have two 2116's each taking full routes, filtering only one or two AS's for entry into the routing table, and passing those through to a third 2116 in the middle. Only allowing 1 AS path away doesn't quite fill up each router's L3HW offload memory, but 2 or more AS's does.

Once those routes only 1 AS away are loaded and pushed down to the switch chip, the CPU's run at around 5-7% with 2Gbps of non-stop traffic.

If I allow more AS's in past the filter, it pushes more traffic back to the CPU and the load goes up, but not by much. With L3HW offload completely disabled, I peak at maybe 15-20% between routing and routing processes.

I did try allowing all routes in on the edge routers, but I don't remember if I passed them all through to the central router. Either way, they all continued to work just fine.