Downloading and utilising bandwidth data

[khensthoth]

Hi. Thanks for your great work on Gargoyle. I am currently using 1.0.0 beta 4 brcm 2.4 on a WRT54GL router, which is relatively low on memory. I was hoping to be able to be able to partially mitigate the low memory issue by periodically downloading the bandwidth data to my local computer. Would that actually help with the low memory issue?

I have got to the point where I can find them and download to my local computer, but I am unable to open the file, nor do I know what software to use to render the files. It would be great if you could point me to the right direction.

Thanks.

[Eric]

That won't help. That would free flash space, not memory. Also, there's a maximum size those files can get (old data gets removed after a certain amount of time), so it won't over-run available flash space.

If you're using QoS, Quotas, or Access Restrictions I strongly suggest you try one of the bleeding edge images, as I recently fixed one issue that was sucking up a lot of memory if any of those services are active.

[khensthoth]

Thanks for the prompt reply, and for clarifying the issue. What if I just want to download and keep a record of my bandwidth data? What should I use to visualise it?

I tried the bleeding edge release but the configuration seems to be a lot more complex compared to beta 4. In addition, when I use the upgrade function in the web interface, it gives no indication of anything is done, nor does it reboot - which is why I was a little afraid.

I have been using ssh, wget and mtd to flash firmwares ever since.

I shall try the bleeding edge release again in the near future. Thanks.

[Eric]

You can backup the data in /usr/data/bwmon but your best bet is to use gargoyle itself to visualize the bandwidth data. The format is a binary format specific to the bandwidth monitor -- I wanted something that would take up the smallest amount of disk space, but that means it's not particularly easy to visualize it outside of gargoyle.

The upgrade section in the latest firmware should work fine. There is a 90 second delay after finishing the flash procedure before it tries to reload ip 192.168.1.1. This is because the time it will take to reload varies based on the router/firmware being flashed so it just waits a full 90 seconds before reloading.

[khensthoth]

Thanks again.

I am currently back to Tomato as my Pidgin doesn't run too well with OpenWRT-based firmware installed on the router. Somehow, for some strange reason, Pidgin (on two clients, in Windows and in Ubuntu) would constantly be disconnected. Furthermore the internet seems to be slow, even after a reboot. Again, I am not sure why. The same problem was experienced when I tried X-WRT yesterday.

[Eric]

That's a bit odd.. I use pidgin all the time without disconnection, and my internet speed seems fine. Just how fast are we talking about? I read somewhere that an OpenWrt 8.09 WAN connection was benchmarked at a max of 20MB/s while tomato can go up to 35MB/s, though I don't know of any ISP that offers service anywhere close to those speeds, so the difference is usually irrelevant.

Are you connecting via PPPoE? As I have cable, not DSL, that may explain why I'm not seeing the same thing.

[khensthoth]

Yea, I do have a 24MBits DSL PPPoE connection. The router, however, is just connected to the ADSL2+ modem, getting the WAN IP from the modem through DHCP.

One thing I noticed about the the router and downloading torrent is that overall Tomato is more stable, but the speed is much slower. OpenWRT-based firmware can attain speed much higher but overall the internet seems less stable and reactive.

I will continue to see if my Pidgin is acting up and let you know.

[khensthoth]

Hi again. I reflashed my WRT54GL with the bleeding edge firmware, and it seems a lot of the previous issues are gone. The interface is less buggy, and Pidgin seems to be connected and doesn't suffer from disconnection.

The upgrade interface is still problematic for me - I uploaded a firmware, waited at least 3 minutes and it didn't reboot. I proceeded to ssh into the router to reboot it, and when it came back on, it was still the old firmware, as if nothing had happened.

One issue I noticed is that Gargoyle (and OpenWRT based firmwares) seems to have higher load averages. Running it normally with Static DHCP, Port Forwarding and Wireless on, and surfing normally seems to incur a load average of around 0.30 - 0.50. When I am running the same services and downloading torrent at the same time, the load averages can go higher than 2.00. (Running Tomato normally has load averages of about 0.10, and around 0.40 with torrents). I am kinda a Linux newbie, so I might not fully comprehend that. Should I be concerned?

[Eric]

I'm glad to hear the bleeding edge firmware solves a lot of your problems -- I thought it might.

I wouldn't worry too much about the load average. The worst that can happen if your cpu is being over-worked is that a few packets get dropped and your connection speed goes down a little. The real worry is memory usage, not cpu usage. If more memory is needed than what is available, one of your processes is going to get killed which can lead to very bad things, such as your router crashing.

I'm rather surprised that you're having trouble with the upgrade interface. I own a WRT54GL and I just tried upgrading via the web interface on that router today, and it seemed to work fine. It's possible that if you're running a lot of services/ experiencing heavy traffic load there wasn't enough memory to upload the firmware (it gets uploaded to the ram disk since there's not enough room on the flash disk) and it died. You might try disconnecting the wan connection and possibly QoS next time to try to reduce the memory drain before upgrading.

[khensthoth]

Thanks again. I'll try when I'm free. Keep up the good work.