Can't get my mikrotik router to run anymore than 150 nodes

The RB5009 says it has a limit of over a million entries in its NAT table:-

[admin@MikroTik] /ip/firewall/nat> /ip/firewall/connection/tracking/print
                   enabled: auto
               active-ipv4: yes
               active-ipv6: yes
      tcp-syn-sent-timeout: 5s
  tcp-syn-received-timeout: 5s
   tcp-established-timeout: 1d
      tcp-fin-wait-timeout: 10s
    tcp-close-wait-timeout: 10s
      tcp-last-ack-timeout: 10s
     tcp-time-wait-timeout: 10s
         tcp-close-timeout: 10s
   tcp-max-retrans-timeout: 5m
       tcp-unacked-timeout: 5m
        loose-tcp-tracking: yes
               udp-timeout: 40s
        udp-stream-timeout: 40s
              icmp-timeout: 10s
           generic-timeout: 10m
               max-entries: 1015808
             total-entries: 5866

But I suspect it would fold up before that and that even if it could handle that many the number of packets with that number of safenode connections would have overwhelmed its routing ability.

But anyway, I think @neo is completely right that it’s your limit of 200Mb/s upload that is the limiting factor. There are spikes in node activity that will be trying to be above that with 150 nodes.

This is what the port looks like on the RB5009 for the RPi4 with 10 nodes on it:-

Spiky.

If I were running a few more the spikes would be over the upload limit and safenodes would suffer. Before that general internet use in the house for things that involve a lot of sending like Zoom or Teams for work for me and the missus and I’d be in the doghouse.

@moderators Suggest moving this topic to