I recently picked up a RB750 to try out the platform and must say that I am impressed. So much so that I have decided to expand my implementation. I do however, have some performance concerns.

First, I am trying out RouterOS on x86 hardware as an internal router to pass traffic between vLANs. I have 4 vLANs with no firewalling between them. My hardware is a 2.8Ghz Xeon, 128MB ram, 1GB disk (Technically a VM on an ESXi server if it matters). It seems that I can only pass about 54Mbit traffic before the processor hits 100% utilized. In contrast, I have been using a Debian box for this purpose and under that implementation, it hardly touched the performance of the processor.

Is this the performance I should expect for RouterOS on x86 hardware or am I just doing things very wrong?

On a similar note, I want to upgrade my access point and have been considering an RB600a with a R52n card. Can I expect this platform to actually achieve anywhere near the theoretical limits of 802.11n or am I going to run into the same performance issue where the underlying hardware can't push the packets across the interfaces?

Thank you in advance for any insight you have to offer.

The vm is the issue. you are going to lose a lot of packets with a relative high load only passing through the machine
(i had a VM just bridging 2 ethernets and the cpu was 100% with around 50mbits of traffic)
Using the same hardware but with native ros installed, the cpu is 1%
The VM has to emulate the interfaces and since you can't install the vm tools into ros it makes the work harder for the machine eating up all the processor.
Since 3.28 they fixed the multi-cpu so you can safely run a core router into a quadcore and heavly load it.
And don't put 2 cpus into the VM. It doesn't solve the problem.. just hides it but you are still losing packets and having latency issues.

Sounds plausible. I'll try it out on bare hardware this weekend.

Anyone have any insight on using an RB600a with 802.11n and if it can actually push the packets across at full speed?

Thank you.

Wow, you're definitely on to something there with the VM. If I do a bandwidth test between my RB750 and my x86 (in a VM), I max out at 50Mbit. The VM has a 2.6Ghx Xeon pegged and the RB750 is running around 33% utilized.

I've maxed out the 10/100 ports on my 750, at about 60% load.
And my X86 router, which is a AMD 3000+ with 1gb of ram, I've maxed out the 2 intel gig interfaces in it. at about 70% cpu load

What virtual driver are you using for your network? It was my understanding the e1000 driver hasnt been working since Ros 3.23.