Maybe my question is answered in some topic somewhere but I could not find it.

Has anyone tested how many NTP requests a Mikrotik router can handle when it is configured to be a NTP server?
I realize that it should be different depending on hardware model.
But if anyone has tested this and what model it was that would be very helpful.

I'm exploring the possibility of using some sort of router as an NTP appliance.

Thanks in advance for any response.

//Andreas

The ancient RB333 can handle about 580 NTP requests per second. That should be good enough for a local network. On a newer RB it might be few thousands and on x86-64 it would probably be at least few tens of thousands.

The ancient RB333 can handle about 580 NTP requests per second. That should be good enough for a local network.

After their clock stabilises, all sane NTP clients reduce polling frequency down to one poll (per peer/server) every 512 or 1024 seconds. If NTP server can handle 100s requests per second, that means order of magnitude 10k to 100k (or even 1M) clients. While I wouldn't host a public NTP service on a tiny RB it should suffice for a fairly large network. Certainly larger than a typical SOHO (or even small to medium business) LAN.
I guess it would start to have problems with peer stats (if that's enabled in ROS) with that many clients.