Scp transfer speed is only 1-2MBps is this normal?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I have YOUKU YK1 (MediaTek MT7620A) with openwrt 18.06.2. When I transfer files from clients to my router via wifi I only get about 1-2MBps or sometimes even worse. Here's my /etc/config/wireless content:

config wifi-device 'radio0'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option channel '11'
        option hwmode '11ng'
        option path 'platform/10180000.wmac'
        option country 'US'
        option legacy_rates '1'
        option htmode 'HT40'

config wifi-iface 'default_radio0'
        option device 'radio0'
        option network 'lan'
        option mode 'ap'
        option ssid 'OpenWrt'
        option key 'mypassword'
        option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'

iperf3 result:

root@OpenWrt:~# iperf3 -s
-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 192.168.1.162, port 55068
[  5] local 192.168.1.1 port 5201 connected to 192.168.1.162 port 55070
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5]   0.00-1.00   sec  1.75 MBytes  14.7 Mbits/sec
[  5]   1.00-2.00   sec  2.16 MBytes  18.1 Mbits/sec
[  5]   2.00-3.00   sec  2.18 MBytes  18.3 Mbits/sec
[  5]   3.00-4.00   sec  2.36 MBytes  19.8 Mbits/sec
[  5]   4.00-5.00   sec  2.42 MBytes  20.3 Mbits/sec
[  5]   5.00-6.00   sec  1.51 MBytes  12.6 Mbits/sec
[  5]   6.00-7.00   sec  2.14 MBytes  18.0 Mbits/sec
[  5]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.89 MBytes  15.9 Mbits/sec
[  5]   8.00-9.00   sec  2.12 MBytes  17.8 Mbits/sec
[  5]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.96 MBytes  16.5 Mbits/sec
[  5]  10.00-10.05  sec  83.4 KBytes  13.9 Mbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5]   0.00-10.05  sec  20.6 MBytes  17.2 Mbits/sec                  receiver
-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201
-----------------------------------------------------------

scp from my PC to my router via wifi:

[manjaro@linux tmp]$ scp -C /run/media/manjaro/Data/Movie/The.Dark.Knight.2008.BluRay.720p.Ganool.se.mkv root@192.168.1.1:/mnt/usb2
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.1.1' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
The.Dark.Knight.2008.BluRay.720p.Ganool.se.mkv                                                                                                                    2%   25MB   1.4MB/s   13:34 ETA

Is there a way to make the transfer speed faster ?

2

That pretty much aligns to your wifi performance. SCP using dropbear is slow (well documented) and your rather slow SoC doesn't make it any better. From what I recall anything else by Ralink/Mediatek than isn't supported by the mt76 driver does have poor performance which seems to apply to your device as there are no additional drivers added to the image. https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/blob/master/target/linux/ramips/mt7620/target.mk#L10

3

~ 8-16 Mbits/sec

Add encryption costs.

Add slow interface/storage access overhead.

4

@vgaetera Yes it is true for most of the low-end devices but hardware performance can be improved through improving software and this is the case for xrx200 based devices. If you look into this thread you may know that with some patches we were able to increase the overall performance of the SoC through IRQ balancing. I am not really sure if all of the patches did the trick but I am able to get more than 100mbps out of 150mbps from Wifi while downloading and around 70mbps average while uploading without any use of Flow Offloading.

In this case @diizzy 's answer might be more related. I have not tried SCP myself but I did try iperf3 and have amazing speeds, more than 100mbps ethernet. Test logs are also available in the thread but it's also possible that the driver support can be improved in future so it may increase performance.

1 Like
5

True, I just try to say that scp is not far from iperf3 in this case:

1 Like
6

If I use samba instead of scp do you think it'll be faster ?

7

Actually it may be even slower.
You need to improve wireless and network stack performance in general:

8

Maybe another 1mb/s at most in my opinion. AFAIK iperf3 uses whole CPU so if it cannot provide any improvement in transfer speeds then dont count on Samba as well. You can try to force 40mhz on your Wifi and it may provide somewhat better results.

9

This issue is that your wifi (link) performance is poor which will affect everything else, changing transfer protocols wont help much at the speed you're looking at.