Hi. Casual user here.
After an upgrade to ½gigabit, I by accident discovered that my netgear wndr3700 (latest openwrt 18.06) maxed out @ ~250mb/s over lan. I tinkered with a few settings and could get it to ~350. I said 'fåggit', and exchanged it with my old asus n56u (openwrt 14.04) and again saw speeds of only slightly above 250. I said 'fåggit', and slapped my laptop directly on the net, and that gives ~550mb/s, as expected. Tests are done via https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest..
With 2 routers with different versions experiencing same bottleneck, I'll assume that everything OpenWRT-wise are working okay, but that these routers simply are not fast enough. (500 - 650mhz). However, I remember that at least the n56u have hardware for full gigabit on the backplane, so I'll again assume that the driver are proprietary, and not enabled in vanilla Openwrt ?
I hate buying when I can fix. With a little help I can find my way around most problems, but as a casual OpenWrt user, I'm not sure I have the energy to learn how to one-time compile a proprietary blob into the firmware. Assuming my assumption are correct , what would be a smart solution to getting full speed via my old gear ?
Options:
- I could just buy a cheap 10$ 1gb/s router in china.
- I could revert to asus n56u firmware - for a while.
- check out if other firmware have copied/enabled the proprietary blob - Padawan?
- Try to squeze as much out of the things with hw/sw tricks. Prolly wouldn't give much.
- find out if I can extract and compile openwrt with the blob myself (i did some quick searching without luck).
Additionally on the same subject-ish:
-
One thing are a massive up/down-loads from a test, but wouldn't a slow router like above still be able to handle smaller bursts at full speed from 1 user ? a small buffer or something ? ..and if, how do one test for such 'burst-speeds' capabilities ?
-
Both Openwrt 14 and 18 contains newer kernels. Does vanilla OpenWrt prioritise hw/cpu for network traffic, or does it share with installed services ? (in other words, how much does a hard working (ie. compiling) Openwrt slow down routing speed ?)
Thanks. (and special thx to OpenWrt devs+support)