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Comment by goodpoint | Hacker News Reader

> For 25 Gb/s Ethernet links, a commercial router is unlikely to be much cheaper or to consume much less than a standard PC.

EDIT: I linked to a switch by mistake.

This router has 12 x 10G SFP+ and 2 x 25G SFP28 ports and costs $595

It appears to be routing between 13 to 39Gbps depending on the rule complexity.

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs#fndtn-specif...

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This is a switch and switching is hardware accelerated. While you can theoretically route with this this, it is incapable of routing at gigabit speeds, let alone 10 gigabit speeds, once you need even a few rules.

Actually that switch has hardware accelerated routing as well with RouterOS 7 IIRC. Take a look at the test results, for large packets that router will still do over 10G throughput with 25 ip filter rules. With no queues or rules it'll do routing just as fast as switching.

Edit: Looks like he changed from the switch to a separate router but look at the change log for the latest R7 release

https://mikrotik.com/download/changelogs/development-release...

>!) added L3 HW support for all CRS3xx devices;

So you get L3 even for this monster. https://mikrotik.com/product/crs326_24s_2q_rm

Interesting. I had only looked at RouterOS 6. I have had trouble with mikrotik software before though. (I have a CSS 610 and a lot of its core features were completely broken before)

> After my previous disappointment with the MikroTik CCR2004, I decided to try a custom PC build.

The article's author considered that exact router and rejected it.

He goes into greater detail here: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-05-28-configured-an...

That‘s a switch, not a router. Much simpler hardware.

Here‘s a MikroTik Router with 28 Gbit/a throughput: https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1036-8G-2SplusEM

$1300 and up to 73W

That's a bit of an odd example to choose.

This[0] has a $600 MSRP, with twelve 10Gbps ports and two 25Gbps ports. It's ~32W before you add the SFP+ modules, and upwards of 50W if you have all modules populated.

In the benchmarks they list, this can provide somewhere on the order of 13Gbps to 40Gbps of routing, depending on exactly what you're doing. (Smaller packets will lower these numbers, but if you care about bandwidth you're unlikely to be worried about smaller packets... at that point, you probably care more about kpps.)

[0]: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs

the benchmark you even link shows absolutely abysmal performance curves, dropping down into even half a gig perf for small packets single stream.

Calling any benchmark "abysmal" requires a point of comparison, and you have provided none... so it doesn't really encourage good discussion. What's the point of your comment? It seems to just be a way of insulting someone else's product.

Which comparably priced router are you thinking of that has a "non-abysmal" performance curve for small packet bandwidth?

Fair. It was the first router I found on their site with listed throughout >= 25 Gbit/s.

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