Or alternatively is there any way to have traffic from upstream get sent out to a traffic shaping box and have it return to the same router before being sent back out again to the network? I've tried messing around with VRFs and policy routes but couldn't make it work on the bench.RouterOS comes with a specific set of packages that provide basic functionality. I know we'd be dropping down from 72 cores to closer to 24 cores, but they'd be far more powerful cores than Tilera, and we'd have a boatload more RAM, CPU cache etc. I'm not able to find any recent forum posts out there with folks doing anything similar though. I think I can get interface cards with enough 10Gbit ports to make that work. One thought I had was to put in a Xeon 4 x blade server, as you can get some seriously powerful ones that will fit into 2U, and then run the x86 Mikrotik on two blades and the traffic shaping software on another. The next move up is a full rack + crossconnect, which is going to cost an arm and a leg extra in monthly fees.

Ideally we'd like to install a dedicated traffic shaping appliance (with that sweet sweet FQ_CoDel), so we can get better performance and reduce the load on the 1072 - but we only have 2U available in the rack we are subleasing so we can't fit the two CCRs + 1U server it'd take to do that.

Once it gets beyond 60% CPU we start to see glitchiness like 2-3 sec drops of all traffic, or intermittent maxing of all cores to 100% (profiler just showing 'Networking' as the culprit). I have a situation where we are doing about 4.5gbit of WISP traffic (~2000 subscribers, mostly residential) and our CCR1072 is starting to get overwhelmed, mostly with queues.

Routeros x86