RouterOS includes a tool to show CPU usage that is similar to CPU information displayed by Window’s Task Manager. The processes can be viewed here, but they have to stopped under their normal settings. For example, if I saw that the firewall was consuming most of my CPU, I would have to go to the firewall to turn that process off, it can not be done through this tool. Older versions only display the average values for all cores, but the newer RouterOS versions allow you see the break down of utilization on specific cores as well; just select the CPU drop down. MikroTik calls each categories a classifier. A list of current classifiers can be seen below.
Classifiers
Profiler classifies processes into several classifiers. Most of them are self explanatory and does not require detailed a explanation.
- idle – shows unused CPU. Typically idle=100%-(sum of all process cpu usages).
- ppp
- pppoe
- ppp-compression
- ppp-mppe
- ethernet – cpu used by ethernets when sending/receiving packets
- bridging
- encrypting – cpu used by packet encryption
- ipsec – IP security
- queuing – packet queuing
- firewall – packet processing in Ip firewall
- l7-matcher – cpu used by Layer7 matcher.
- p2p-matcher – Peer-to-peer traffic matcher in ip firewall
- gre – Gre tunnels
- eoip – EoIP tunnels
- m3p – MikroTik Packet Packer Protocol
- radius
- ip-pool
- routing
- sniffing
- traffic-accounting
- traffic-flow
- console
- telnet
- ssh
- ftp
- tfpt
- www
- dns
- snmp
- socks
- web-proxy
- winbox
- metarouter-fs
- metarouter-net
- kvm
- profiling – cpu used by Profiler tool itself
- btest – bandwidth test tool
- logging
- flash – cpu usage when writing to NAND
- disk – cpu usage when wiring to Disk
- networking – core packet processing
- serial
- usb
- firewall-mgmt
- queue-mgmt
- fetcher
- backup
- graphing
- health
- isdn
- dhcp
- hotspot
- radv – IPv6 route advertisement
- ntp – NTP server/client
- ldp
- mpls
- pim – Multicast routing protocol
- igmp-proxy
- bgp
- ospf
- rip
- mme
- synchronous – cpu usage by synchronous cards
- gps
- user-manager
- wireless
- dude
- supout.rif – cpu used by supout.rif file creator.
- management – RouterOS management processes that do not fall into any other classifier. For example, when routes added to kernel, internal messaging exchange between RouterOS applications, etc.
- unclassified – any other processes that were not classified.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial! If you have any questions or insights, please add a comment below.