I installed OpenWrt on TP-Link Archer A7 V5. At first the speed is not great, getting only 150 Mbps; direct connect to ISP fiber-coax-adapter gives 400 Mbps. I saw this post solved-after-flashing-openwrt-slow-speeds-solved and enabled software and hardware offloading, the speed picked up to ~350 Mbps, so it seems all is good.
However, for certain downloads (listed below) I'm getting 0.2 MB per second (You can imagine my frustration):
(Wired connection, multiple servers. Slow speed happens only after using OpenWrt)
Everything else is fine. I can watch 4K youtube videos without buffering. So overall speed is good, but why crawling speed for those listed above?
Forgive me a small rant: I used OpenWrt 3 years ago on a 100 MB router, it was good. Then This year after installing OpenWrt on this TP-Link Archer, I need to trouble shoot these pain points, it is really frustrating.
That is, give or take, the true performance of this SOC, depending on your tolerance for lagging ~150-180 MBit/s routing/ NAT throughput.
While software flow-offloading can extend that (quite a bit, as you noticed), it can't accelerate everything and comes with other side effects as well. Hardware flow-offloading is not implemented for this hardware, at best it does nothing, but it can't do anything good.
Which device are you using to download the files?
An Unraid server, a linux VM in Unraid, and a linux server in a mini desktop PC. I also just tried the browser in a MacBook M2, the same.
Where is the download written to? Internal flash storage? External HDD? Thumb drive?
To internal SSD drive.
Do you get better speed if you download same files via the browser? Yes No
What do you mean by "Slow speed happens only after using OpenWrt"
I mean it never happened before I installed OpenWrt on the router
You can lighten burden a bit using ruleset.uc from
and fw4.uc and zone-mssfix.uc (raw files not html pages) from firewall4 main branch.
(every file is interreplacable from 23.05.0 onwards, backups in /rom)
check with fw4 check, apply with service firewall restart
I suspect crappy speed is from missed MSS fixup, see history in fw4 repo.
Thank you for your suggestion! It looks really complicated... Do you think a "missed MSS fixup" would cause a 200 KB per sec download from GitHub, while at the same time allowing 4K youtube video without buffering? I am really struggling to understand this.
I don't plan to invest too much time and energy into OpenWrt at this moment. If some simple config in the UI cannot fix it, I think I would have to revert to stock firmware.
I gotta say, this makes no sense at all. The router doesn't care whether you initiated the download via the command line or via the browser.
So next question: can you verify that you are getting better download speeds when downloading via browser vs download via the command line on the same machine?
Then the title is misleading as it explicitly says
command line download speed is very slow
My best guess is that the selective speed downgrade has something to do with your provider. Unlikely that the router or OpenWrt is to blame. Probably you switching to OpenWrt and the provider having an issue is just an unhappy coincidence.
You can try to measure some stable test like cloudflare or waveform OpenWRT vs OEM. Say on C7 I did not get gigabit wired NAT promised... I could post blind copypasta, but to avoid any doubts I prefer to force you to examine that patches dont do anything bad.
Frontier sent a technician and replaced my ONT, got rid of the two Ethernet over coax adapters so that the router directly connects to ONT. Problem solved - I'm getting above 400 Mbps both direction, and file download is normal fast again. So yeah, this issue has nothing to do with OpenWrt.
Added here as a conclusion. Thank you everyone for your help!