Slow download speed with Gargoyle

[scarhill]

Hi,

I installed Gargoyle 1.6.0 on a Netgear WNDR3800 and noticed that my download speeds seemed slow. When I tested I found that I was getting 2 to 3 Mbps down and 4.5 Mbps up with QoS disabled. Speeds with QoS on were even slower. My advertised connection speed is 30/4 and when I put my old router (an Actiontec MI424WR) back in place, I was back to 20 Mbps downloads. I flashed the WNDR3800 back to the stock firmware and am getting my advertised 30/4.

I found this thread from three years ago, but the WNDR3800 is not underpowered and I don't see high CPU.

Any ideas on what might be causing this, or what to do about it?

[pbix]

Are these tests with the wired or wireless interface of your router?

You will need both results to understand more about what is happening.

[scarhill]

Thanks for the reply! I get the same result for both wireless and wired.

Additional update:
I flashed a second WNDR3800 with Openwrt and it has the same problem: upload speeds are normal, but downloads are very slow, < 1 Mbps.

Also, I doubt it's related, but I thought I'd mention that in order to get a WAN connection with either Gargoyle or Openwrt, I had to apply the fix described in this thread.

[scarhill]

I seemed to have solved the problem, but I'm not sure how.

Here's what I did:

• Reinstalled Gargoyle on the second router.

• Configured it on a different subnet to run behind the first router, which was still running stock firmware.

• Ran a speed test from a machine with a wired connection to the Gargoyle box. It was at full speed! I tried changing the WAN port speed with ethtool. It had no effect, the speed test remained fast.

At this point my plan was to put the Gargoyle router back in place and then experiment with using ethtool to get it to connect to my cable modem (a Cisco DPC3208). Because I was tired of going down to the basement to restart the modem when I switched routers, I cloned the MAC address from the other router. Surprising, the Gargoyle router cam up with an immediate WAN connection! (Before the routers running Gargoyle or Openwrt refused to connect until I used the ethtool trick I mentioned in the previous post.) I then released the WAN IP address and removed the MAC override. Again the router connected immediately!

So everything is now working, but I have no idea what fixed the issue. Sorry for the overly detailed post, but I though it might help the next person who runs into a similar issue.

[ericwong]

I have recently updated my custom built Gargoyle firmware from 1.5.9 to 1.6.1.

I also noticed the cpu load is a lot higher in the latest version.
I am not certain whether the cause of the high cpu load is due to Gargoyle or Openwrt changes.

I can see using SSH the cpu load is primarily in sirq when someone is downloading/uploading at high speed, e.g. 500kbps. Wired/wireless does not seems to matter, both use more cpu than previous versions.

In any case, I experienced WIFI related problem on my specific router that I can't fix and I had no choice but had to downgrade back to 1.5.9.