MikroTik Simple Queue Generator
Generate RouterOS simple queue commands with correct target, max-limit, burst and priority - including the upload/download ordering that catches everyone out.
Result
/queue simple
add name="customer-01" target=192.168.88.10/32 max-limit=20000k/100000k priority=8/8 queue=default-small/default-small comment="generated by Netvorx Tools"/queue simple
print stats where name="customer-01"
remove [find name="customer-01"]What these values mean
- max-limit order
- upload/download - target-upload first
- limit-at
- not set (best effort only)
- Queue type
- default-small - suitable up to a few hundred Mbit/s
- Placement
- Simple queues are evaluated in order, top to bottom, first match wins
About MikroTik Simple Queue Generator
Simple queues are RouterOS's per-target rate limiter: one entry, one target, an upload and a download ceiling. They are the right tool for a handful of customers or a guest network, and the wrong tool once you have hundreds of subscribers - that is what PCQ and queue trees are for.
max-limit, limit-at and burst
max-limit is the ceiling. limit-at is the guarantee honoured even when the parent is congested - it only means anything inside a queue hierarchy. burst-limit allows a temporary excess while the average measured over burst-time stays under burst-threshold; set the threshold below the committed rate or burst will fire once and never re-arm.
Ordering matters
Simple queues are evaluated top to bottom and the first matching entry wins. A broad 0.0.0.0/0 queue placed above specific customer queues will swallow everything below it - check the order after any bulk import.
Common use cases
- Rate-limiting a guest or IoT VLAN.
- Applying a temporary limit to one heavy user without touching RADIUS.
- Building a lab equivalent of a subscriber plan to test an application.
Edge cases and gotchas
- Rates are written upload/download; bare numbers are bits per second, so use the k and M suffixes.
- Simple queues run on the CPU. Past a few hundred entries on a small router, queue processing becomes the bottleneck - move to queue trees with PCQ or offload to the NAS.
- A subnet target shares one limit across all hosts in it.