My estimate is it should be fine at least for 700/700 Mbit of node traffic. How many nodes that will be depends on how high will be average load of the network.
1 Like
Mine is the 5009 so not as powerful as some but has the right features in one box.
It is still over powered for my internet link of 750 down 40 up
I have been running 60 + 5 (65) without the son even noticing anything. Oh and doing upload testing as well.
I have a rate limit in the router for the 60 node one at 35Mbit/s but is not needed for 60 nodes and I am sure now that I can go to 100, just not sure if the son might be affected at that point.
Using 60 since that is the number of nodes my monitoring script can display on the screen with all the info per node I was wanting
5 Likes
5009 is a beast, basically last step before superexpensive backbone routers. It is roughly double the performance of AX3 (and AX3 roughly double of AX2).
5009 with 1000 nodes runs under 50% CPU
4 Likes
my internet currently is 50 down 12 up non fiber which is getting installed in 4 days 
with my tplink router over 15 nodes would bring the internet in the house to a stand still.
now that the MikroTik hAP AX3 is running the show I have pushed up to 50 nodes and the kids can still stream so looks like there is hope for home setups
i5 8gb ram 1tb HD thin client
@scottefc86 @Southside this might be of interest to you guys
6 Likes
50 nodes with 12 up is impressive 
I have 80up and anything over 60 nodes gets me evicted. New router Might be on my Christmas list 
2 Likes
Yes, upload bandwidth needed by relatively idle nodes has dropped a lot with this last upgrade or 2
Not sure what itâll be like if activity increases a lot.
4 Likes
Server arrived, and all setup now to run containers! Will end up provisioning up to 200 containers with terraform (alpine containers), and each container setup to run 50 safenodes pids, and a tons of port mappings to the router. I suspect at least on the RAM front, it could house up to 10,000 nodes if it wasnât bottle-necked on CPU and bandwidth firstâŚ
Not sure when I am going to be feeling brave to try to push it to its limits 
.
I am really curious how many NAT session tables end up being generated (test the limits of my current router!). I feel something there isnât letting it exceed over say 1M+ session tables (though the current limit is set to 32M)⌠but will come to know soonish .
7 Likes
I have the same unit. Running 50 nodes. No complaints from the family. Some have Zoom calls all day and no issues.
@neo Great recommendation! Thank you!
1 Like
If you have only one internet facing IP address then Iâd be wondering if the number of ports available could be an issue.
Actually if you go back it was someone else who recommended it first. I just joined the bandwagon 
1 Like
Should be okay⌠though I do have multiple public IPs but will attempt to just use 1 for now to keep it simple⌠.
1 Like
I have similar hardware and my bottle neck was router hardware. I fairly decent eq and I canât get even nearly those numbers.
@Josh That MikroTik router that you always had trouble with when you went over 500 (IIRC) nodes, can you tell me its RAM size
1 Like
Itâs at around 600.
Happened on both the CCR2004 4GB RAM and on the CCR2116 16GB RAM.
I havenât pushed that hard in a long time so idk if it remains the same these days.
1 Like
Ok then its not the issue I examine in a write up I am doing. It would have been if the RAM was like 2GB or less
So nothing to see here move along LOLOL
2 Likes
From what I understand, the OS for all Microtik routers will never handle more than 1,024,000 concurrent connections no matter how much RAM the unit has. That is probably the limiting factor here because during surge events the number of CCâs per node can approach 2000. Around 500 nodes should be the max a Microtik router should be provisioned for.
Edit: never handle more than 1,048,576.
2 Likes
I have seen mixed reports that it is dynamic. It is âcappedâ but provided the router has enough RAM it will increase.
It is difficult to get decent info on it, mikrotik confirms that to be the case, users say it doesnât happen.
1 Like
Highest number of connections I saw was around 250k during those âcrashâ events in the last testnet with 1000/1000 Mbit of node traffic. On 10/10 Gbit you could theoretically hit the 1M connections limit, but I think you would hit CPU limit first on most boxes.
Larger connections table also means every table lookup takes more CPU time, it may be only few cycles, but with millions of packets it plays a role.
3 Likes
This is from the Microtik Router OS Manual:
âMax amount of entries that the connection tracking table can hold. This value depends on the installed amount of RAM. Note that the system does not create a maximum-size connection tracking table when it starts, it may increase if the situation demands it and the system still has free RAM, but the size will not exceed 1048576â
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/130220087/Connection+tracking
Note: They probably use a matrix of 1024 x 1024 for the tracking table.
5 Likes
Hell there is an awful lot of confusion regarding that then. Definitely explains the reports of it not working 
Thanks that little paragraph has eluded me.
1 Like
Just thought Iâd mention that if you run docker containers via docker compose and plan on doing simple port mapping then docker does spawn one process per mapping which is rather non-performant on larger scale⌠Works well for a couple of ports but for a wider range the only options are host networking or doing some docker network magic
Ignore me if you already know about that and are possibly even more knowledged than meâŚ
I guess if you use k8s which you might want to use anyway because thatâs such a large and professional set up youâll probably be fine
3 Likes