I've been using OpenWT on the OpenWRT One router for about a year. Recently wireless performance has fallen to the point that, at times, I can't watch a video on my phone and struggle to load websites. On my wired desktop computer, I notice lag spikes every few seconds that go from 20 ms up to 300-1000 ms. I see similar spikes when I look at the Bandwidth Real-Time Graphs in OpenWRT, but I don't really know how to interpret what I'm seeing.
I'm pretty new to this and not sure how to proceed with troubleshooting this problem. Any guidance is much appreciated. I'm happy to post any logs or anything else that's needed. Thank you.
The best starting point is to look at the configs...
Please connect to your OpenWrt device using ssh and copy the output of the following commands and post it here using the "Preformatted text </> " button (red circle; this works best in the 'Markdown' composer view in the blue oval):
Remember to redact passwords, VPN keys, MAC addresses and any public IP addresses you may have:
First comment is why are you running an old release candidate from last years stable? Why, at bare minimum, start with 25.12.5 before troubleshooting? mt76 driver has come a long way since then especially with a new product like the One.
Start with setting the country code for each wireless device.
Performance is typically restricted or suboptimal when the country code is unset (often shown as “driver default” in LuCI). This is because the radio falls back to a conservative regulatory domain.
So, looking at your config, things look to be nearly default.
The very first thing to do, if not already done, is to upgrade to 25.12.5 as suggested earlier. When you upgrade, do not keep the settings. This way you'll start with a completely clean slate. (you can of course reset to defaults even after the upgrade). Then, set up wifi (configure the country code, SSID name, encryption type, passphrase, and enable the radios).
At this point, it's best to test with a wired computer directly connected to the lan port of the One. If the performance isn't good, you'll want to test the upstream connection by removing the OpenWrt One and instead connecting your computer directly to the ISP. If that improves things, we'll try to figure out what else could cause problems on the OpenWrt side.
If wired is okay, move on and test wireless and see what happens... if wifi has issues, it may be related to general radio interference, but we can dig deeper at that point.
I think that if the problem occurs not only over Wi-Fi but also via a wired connection, then it can't be solved just by troubleshooting the Wi-Fi. I also highly doubt that the firmware, even if it's old, would just suddenly break out of nowhere.
I like the advice given above: check the internet connection directly via cable without the router, since there is a PC with a network card available. It's quite possible that a contact in the RJ45 (8P8C) connector is just damaged and the cable simply needs to be recrimped.
You could, of course, check how the port is behaving in LuCI, but since the user hasn't done that yet, they either don't know how to do it, or... well, then I don't know either))). It's also entirely possible that the wired PC caught some malware and is just hogging all the bandwidth, to the point where even the router lags and LuCI becomes inaccessible.
One thing is for sure: you won't solve this problem by just fixing the Wi-Fi.
This One has a Filogic series SoC which has great upstream Linux support, but this model has fairly slow CPU clocks at only 1.3GHz, so most people will want to use hardware acceleration to hit higher throughputs (e.g. gigabit or higher on the 2.5gbps port etc):
Upgrade with clean config to 25.12.5
Enable packet steering. I believe this is on by default now.
Enable HFO and WED.
Configure Wi-Fi then enable it.
This is all discussed on the doc page. I just updated the page to make it more clear by adding a new Configuration section and consolidating this info.
People just try, to narrow down one issue at a time.
The other thing is yes things can suddenly break.
Like with a huge uptime suddenly there is an error in one register or the binary firmware of the chip has an issue with the Kernel driver. Things like that.
Second, if there is no reason to run one particular snapshot then as always go to a latest stable release.
Sorry for the late update and thank you for all of the suggestions. This has been a learning experience. I've upgraded the firmware to 25.12.5 and restored the config from backup. I got stuck at "Flashing....", but after about 30 min I just opened a new browser tab and reconnected through Luci and everything seems fine.
I've also set the country code for each device (wireless radio?) and enabled packet steering (all gpu's) and set RPS to 128. I enabled HFO but not WED as I'm waiting for an opportunity to reboot the router. Once I've completed that step I'll start testing both the wireless and wired experience and see if there's an improvement. If I still see issues I'll connect directly to the ISP on my wired desktop and test that connection.
Going through this exercise has shown me just how many people and devices in my house are dependent on one wireless router. I think it's time to install another as an access point for redundancy if nothing else.
Nice and well done, it can be a little daunting the very first time glad it all worked.
Now that it's all setup you can go to the LuCI webUI to System → Attended Sysupgrade page, run that it'll upgrade you firmware for you anytime in the future.
I enabled WED once I figured out that I needed a text editor. Nano did the job. I ran several Waveform buffer float tests with my wired desktop computer and wireless phone.
Upload and download speeds seems pretty good until I'm on the far side of my house on wireless. Latency is inconsistent? I'm not sure how to interpret more from the results. Overall the experience using both wired and wireless seems to have improved. Videos on wireless play smoothly with minimal buffering. I haven't noticed the latency spikes when gaming on my wired computer.
Have I solved my problem? Everything feels better to use, but I wonder if there's more I can do to reduce latency.
What's upstream of your OO? Maybe the problem isn't your router, but your connection to your ISP?
Immediately upstream I have a cable/ethernet adapter. We have fiber at the house, so I assume there are one or more adapters to convert to cable before entering the house. The adapters probably aren't helping things.
You can always use the sed command to enable WED without a text editor, but nano works great too. Anyway, you will likely see a bit more bufferbloat with WED since it bypasses AQL (there are actually big threads about AQL analysis and we have some recommendations on the mt6000 doc page). It's up to you, if you aren't using the main CPUs for much else can leave it disabled. WED is very performant if bufferbloat is not an issue.
When running the Waveform bufferfloat test I was getting grades ranging from B to C. I'm not running any other applications on the router, so I assume that the CPU load is minimal. Maybe I should favor reducing bufferfloat and disable WED until I need to optimize CPU usage.
