Bandwidth limited

[firestruck]

Hi there, ive a fonera + installed this awsome software, everything its working, but the bandwith its too mutch reduced, i have 24 Mb provided from de ISP, usually i was able to download at 2,6 mb/s, now with gargoyle only at 900Kb/s , some configuration to make, ive tried all most but with no luck!Please help!Thanks for your assistance!Best Regards

[Libel]

Hi there,

I have exactly the same issue. First let me tell you I love Gargoyle as it is perfect to monitor web usage and set quotas when you have a teenager in the house

I have tested Gargoyle on a Wrt54gl and Wrt54-rg, I have a 25 mbits internet line. When I download something using Gargoyle, I usually download at 1.5mo/s. If I use DD-Wrt or Tomato, I hit 3mo/s.

I tried different things to get rid of that problem but no luck. Setup for each firmware is standard so no tweaking on Tomato or DD-WRT.

Eric, any idea?

Thanks.

[pbix]

I suppose I am supposed to feel bad for you with your 25MB/s connection while I endure at 100KB/s. I wish we all had your problems man.

Seriously though on your WRT54GL if you turn off QoS you will achieve 3.4MB/s with Gargoyle, Tomato and OpenWRT compared with 4.3 MB/s with DD-WRT. The stock firmware on the WRT54GL will give you about 3.1MB/s.

It is the performance of OpenWRT itself which limits the above and is not specific to Gargoyle.

If you turn QoS on you will get around 2MB/s with Gargoyle and I suspect that Tomato will be similar though I did not test this.

DD-WRT QoS does not work so comparisons are not appropriate.

This is what you get with a $30 router.

MB/s means mega bytes per second. Since Gargoyle often uses bits per second on its screens its easy to get confused.

[Libel]

Hi pbix,

Thanks for your reply. I thought QOS could be the issue so I deactivated it but still no luck I am still at around 1.5mb/s with standard settings, no QOS. Indeed I think Openwrt is more limited in term of speed than tomato and DD-wrt.

Any idea what I could try/tweak?

Thank you.

[DoesItMatter]

Wait for the new version of firmware.

A new version is coming, that will have the new Backfire.

Not entirely sure if its better drivers, or better coded,
but it might have an increase in speed. Just have to wait

[igorfie]

I almost never take what others say for granted, especially when it comes to performance so I ran some tests on a couple of routers I have...

First, I took my WRT54G v2.0 and compared how Gargoyle 1.2.3 performs vs. Tomato 1.27. To measure throughput I used iperf between two Ubuntu 9.10 boxes. For Gargoyle, I tried QoS off, QoS Up on and QoS Up/Down on. I also tested "raw" routing/nat performance with all iptables flushed and default tc qdisc. For Tomato I only tested QoS off and QoS Up. Both Gargoyle and Tomato used their respective default QoS classifications. I ran each test at least three times (but many more usually) and took approx average. So here are the numbers

Tomato QoS off ~25 Mbits/sec
Tomato QoS Up (100000 kbit/s) ~19.4 Mbits/sec

Gargoyle QoS off ~15 Mbits/sec
Gargoyle QoS Up (100000 kbit/s) ~10.6 Mbits/sec
Gargoyle QoS Up/Down (100000 kbit/s) ~9.4 Mbits/sec

Gargoyle "raw" routing/nat ~27.6 Mbits/sec

Then I tried Gargoyle Backfire I build locally from git/master end of last week. I run it on Netgear WNDR3700.


Gargoyle QoS off ~125 Mbits/sec
Gargoyle QoS Up (1000000 kbit/s) ~89 Mbits/sec
Gargoyle QoS Up/Down (1000000 kbit/s) ~75 Mbits/sec

Gargoyle "raw" routing/nat ~263 Mbits/sec

As you can see, Gargoyle performance penalty is quite brutal, even without QoS enabled. I have not decided how to feel about it, though. Gargoyle seems to be fast enough on the netgear, at least for the lines I have. It's not an option for the linksys, unfortunately.

[Eric]

I'm pretty sure the lower speeds are an OpenWrt issue and isn't specific to Gargoyle. The tradeoff is that while OpenWrt supports a lot of different architectures, it isn't optimized for Linksys/broadcom hardware like Tomato is.

[pbix]

igorfie,

Always good to see someone else's actual test results. My test result with QoS Off matches your listed gargoyle "raw" result. I do not have in my notes exactly what I did other than I turned QoS off. I doubt I deleted all the iptables entries so maybe something has changed since that time.

If you could continue your work it would be very interesting. Can you determine which iptables chain or tc qdisc causes the performance to slow from 27Mbit -> 15Mbit. This to me is the critical part.

This difference between "Gargoyle Raw" and "Gargoyle Qos Off" seems like the biggest factor and is most likely Gargoyle specific and not the fault of OpenWrt. Perhaps we can improve.

[igorfie]

Looks like it's bandwidth rules. Using master/backfire brcm-2.4 build on my linksys wrt54g v2.0, I see ~23 Mbits/sec with QoS off and bandwidth rules removed.

I also tried stock backfire. With default config it managed ~25 Mbits/sec with brcm-2.4 build but only ~20 Mbits/sec with brcm47xx.

[Libel]

Thanks guys for your insight and tests.