Full Ram asus rt-58u openwrt

For Developers
1

Dear all,
I already build and flash successful Openwrt to AP asus rt-58u. It work fine for 3-4 devices, but it is suddenly full ram. Sometime I can't load Luci web browser, it work normal when I reboot AP and fine only 10 minutes and get full ram again. Anyone have same issue with me, please share solution. Thanks so much

root@OpenWrt:~# free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:         121020       90352       25164         112        5504        4376
Swap:             0           0           0
2

There is no fix, 802.11ac in general and ath10k in particular are a relatively memory hungry, for a device with two ath10k radios, 128 MB RAM are tight, borderline too tight.

While there is no fix, there are mitigating workarounds to reduce the size- and number of buffers allocated by the kernel module. For the 18.06.x branch and ath10k, those should already be applied by default, for the master branch -which switched to ath10k-ct instead of ath10k- the equivalent patches are still pending. If you're building OpenWrt/ master from source, you can apply these patches to your build (depending on the used ath10k-ct version, you may have to rebase these patches in the future).

If you're looking to buy additional hardware, please do yourself a favour and prefer devices (at least for dual-ath10k based ones) with at least 256 MB RAM instead (most other ipq40xx devices ship with 256 MB RAM or more for good reasons).

3

I have this device too and I have to use a swap partition on a USB drive. No problem so far though I installed Adblock, Transmission and Unbound

4

Dear @utopinux
How do you set up for your asus rt-58u. Could you share your configuration. I research this link for install package


but my AP always full out memory, I can't do anything. It just work fine 5 minutes after reboot.

5

Use of internal flash is not recommended for swap as it will wear it out very quickly and eventually kill your router. The better USB sticks have transfer rates around 5-10 MB/s, common ones more like 1-2 MB/s -- Do the math with 128 MB of RAM and realize that this may bring your router to a crawl.

1 Like
6

I think you can start with this.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/storage/start.
You must have a spare USB ( 512MB is fine) around which can be formated as a swap drive. You can use Minitool Partition Wizard ( if you use Windows) or any similar software to do it . Then you can use Luci web interface to config it as a swap.
Unless you already installs alot of services and lot of clients, the router works fine with 128MB of RAM.
I config my router with 1 TB hard drive including two partitions (swap + ext4). I'm running Adblock, Samba, Tranmission, SQM, DDNS, wireguard, shadowsocks, openvpn , unbound, wifi-schedule, hd-iddle... and the swap is stable at around 40MB.
Hope it helps!