Hi there, super new to openwrt. As title suggests, I have a Belkin RT1800 and after installing openwrt, my speeds have dropped dramatically.
My internet plan is 500 down / 20 up. I have installed adblock and sqm, otherwise untouched. Sqm settings are 98% of advertised speeds from ISP, cake, piece of cake. I followed the recs found here in this reddit thread. All tests were ran via openspeedtest.com
Could anyone point me in any direction to help improve my connection? I really want to enjoy the features of openwrt over stock firmware, but with this performance, I'm better off using stock firmware or a different router.
SQM inparticular is very demanding on the CPU, but mt7621a as a SOC is not very fast - it relies heavily on very well optimized networking drivers and offloading to the hardware, thanks to that it can achieve close to 1 GBit/s via hardware flow-offloading.
…but sqm can't be offloaded (as the kernel needs to be in charge about the fate of each individual packet). I would not expect mt7621a to meet your throughput requirements with sqm.
Beyond this, I kind of doubt that the OEM firmware offers to sqm support to begin with, so your comparative benchmarks are flawed in this regard (you'd need to test either both with- or without sqm).
Gotcha I think I understand. Weird because I feel like I've read a few reviews/user experiences with this router running sqm/qos successfully. Do you suggest any other budget routers (below $50 usd) that would have better performance?
Sure, you can run sqm on this hardware without any problems - just not at 1 GBit/s throughput (more like a tenths of that). If you have a VDSL or LTE, that limit might not even be noticable either.