I'm passing mikrotik-rate-limit from radius to a CCR1036, so simple queues get setup. Everything appears to be working well have ~900 customers online. Speed tests seem to be fine when i test, however, i've been getting complaints about streaming.

Customers say it works fine for a few minutes then suddenly will stop happens on their AppleTV boxes, Roku boxes etc, they have to start the streams over every few minutes to continue streaming.

On static IP's bypassing the mikrotik it seems this issue doesn't exist.

CPU usage on the box is only at 1%.

What funny is that one of the guys complaining's queue is 80M DL 20M DL, so technically unlimited as his connection doesn't go that high so the queue shouldn't be causing any issues with packetloss or anything, so my question is what could be causing this. Are there any known issues with streaming and pppoe on mikrotik that i should be aware of or might need to adjust.

As a note i'm currently only sending UL/DL via mikrotik-rate-limit no burst information or anything else just the flat limits.


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I have noticed at time even though CPU usage is 1% constantly, that if i watch the processes graph 1 cpu randomly jumps to 30-40% randomly every few seconds, not sure if that has anything to do with it.

Have you made any changes to the default settings for Queue Types (/queue type export compact)?

The default queue for most dynamically added simple queues is default-small. The default settings for default-small is a pfifo (packet based first-in-first-out) queue with a max length of 10 packets. As a practical matter, our experience shows this will result in very choppy service for queues larger than 1-2Mbps. Our solution has been to modify the default-small queue for a larger pool (we use 1000 packets). You can also investigate changing which queue gets used as the default for dynamically added queues, but I don't remember where I found that setting (it was more of a pain to remember than just changing the length of a default-small queue).

i actually had seen mention of that, also saw discussion of moving to PCQ, but PCQ would require major changes (profiles on each CCR, and instead of sending speeds from radius would have to modify the way our OSS is sending data which was a pretty big no no for me.

I just upgraded to 6.24 from 6.3, also upgraded from 10 on the small queue to 50 on the default-small as i saw that mentioned on a site.

So your saying to go to 1000? Is their anyway to know what number i should set it to? And what kind of impact it will have on the box.

I ask because i saw the recommendation for 10 -> 50, but now your saying 1000 which seems like a huge jump.

Haven't really seen a comparison of the queue lengths, or pfifo vs sfq or bfifo etc.

Also i saw that MQ PFIFO is an option on the CCR, why is that not the default on the CCR if its the more optimal PFIFO when supported. Or am i missing something, i haven't tried it yet... Or is it not actually supported?

Longer queue length = more CPU usage per queue. We went straight to 1000 because we don't have a ton of simple queues and it doesn't seem to be overloading the CPUs in our equipment. Your mileage may vary.

I can't speak to the other queue types, we haven't tried them.

well moved to 500, but still looks like we have issues, on our old servpoet box, no issue with streaming, via the mikrotik pppoe with queuelength of 500 we're still getting after ~10 minutes the video stops on appletv, and then if i play again it will continue, roku also is buffering randomly.

Whats odd is via the servpoet the stream only gets 20mbit, via the mikrotik the box is getting 35mbit, so even better performance but after 10 minutes the appletv just sticks and stops the video.

If it's freezing at precisely 10 minutes every single time, that would suggest to me some sort of session keepalive/timeout issue (especially in light of the fact that changing queue lengths didn't help).

Just as a heads up, i've had reports from 2 clients since taking gueue length from 100 to 500, that their livetv streaming on roku no longer buffers!

But great tip on the queue length as it is showing promise ..

As a note for anyone else doing this i have a CCR1036 and going from 50 to 500 with ~200 pppoe customers barely budged my memory usage.

BTW anyone know why moving to MQ-PFIFO on the CCR1036 would fail, it said that MQ-PFIFO wasn't allowed every time a pppoe customer tries to connect (i changed default-small to mq-pfifo) and it didnt work. Does CCR not support mq-pfifo?

Appletv still giving me a headache but i'm starting to think somethings up with the appletv box/router combo that i have here that might be the source of that issue from some other issues its having.