I have a couple of TL-WR1043ND v1 since 2010 and have been using them with OpenWRT ever since. I remember that old (pre-19.x) firmwares had some wireless problems, but in the last 5 years it's been pretty rock solid.
I didn't have much bandwidth (<60 Mbit) in the past, but last year I have upgraded my connection to 250 Mbit download / 25 Mbit upload. I now have a Vodafone Station, which doesn't support bridge mode and is a basically a wireless router with an integrated cable modem. So my only choice now is to do double NAT behind the Vodafone Station.
After that I have noticed that on 19.x firmwares TL-WR1043ND v1 NAT performance seems to be capped at 60-65 Mbit. On OpenWrt 21.02.1 r16325-88151b8303 the situation has become even worse, and I get only 25 Mbit sustained over WiFi. The wireless connection doesn't seem to be a problem, it produces sustained 130 Mbit with 20 MHz channel width. The Vodafone Station itself produces sustained 250 Mbit over WiFi.
I have enabled software offloading, but it didn't make any difference. Is it so, that TL-WR1043ND v1 is just unable to produce better NAT performance than 60 Mbit and I conveniently didn't notice it, because I didn't have so much bandwidth? But how come it degraded so much after the upgrade to 21.x series?
I'd appreciate any tips if anything could be done about this! Thank you.
Have not tried the 21.02.x branch on this device but I can only confirm that at the end of 2020 I have been using 18.06.9 and or 19.07.5 on a ~220Mbit dsl line and the WAN to LAN speed was ~190Mbit with a distinct wave pattern. Was amazed that this old router could almost saturate the line.
The wave pattern was noticable with long downloads like a perfect sinus with a mid speed of~190 and 180 at slowes and ~200 highest.
Besides trying to downgrade the software to one of the older releases I mentioned, have you checked the capacitors hardware on this devices and see if they are not leaking or bulging?
I can only confirm that at the end of 2020 I have been using 18.06.9 and or 19.07.5 on a ~220Mbit dsl line and the WAN to LAN speed was ~190Mbit with a distinct wave pattern.
Wow, that's quite amazing! As I said, I was on 19.x before, and I haven't seen speeds higher than 60 Mbit back then. Were those 200 Mbit speeds via LAN or WiFi?
Besides trying to downgrade the software to one of the older releases I mentioned, have you checked the capacitors hardware on this devices and see if they are not leaking or bulging?
Nope, I've never opened the case so far and it didn't even cross my mind. So you'd recommend checking the capacitors to see if they'd be the cause for low speeds? I guess resoldering them for someone who's never done anything like that before would be too risky. I'll have to ask around to see whether someone could help me with that.
Anyways, now that you have confirmed that it was possible for you on 19.x and 18.x, I'm a bit disappointed about 21.x. This was the whole reason for me to use OpenWRT - stay current and secure, even on old devices - but such a performance hit is something that kind of makes them useless even in the most basic configuration (I use stock image with no additional packages).
I'll try to get an Ethernet plug to see what I'm currently getting via LAN, maybe it's a WiFi problem?
As an 8/32 device, the tl-wr1043nd v1 is below minimum system requirements for OpenWrt[0] - and yes, its 400 MHz mips 74Kc SOC is slow, very slow (contemporary ath79 SOCs run at up to 750 MHz - and still run out of steam around 175-200 MBit/s). Keep in mind, while this device was designed and sold on the market, 25-50 MBit/s WAN connections were the king of the world. Yes, you might push[1] it during speedtests, but as walterav said, pushing it beyond its hardware limits results in very jagged throughput results and very bad latency and jitter.
Coping with these line speeds requires considerably better/ faster hardware than this 12 year old early draft-n specimen[2]. While you don't need to go quite as far, So you have 500Mbps-1Gbps fiber and need a router READ THIS FIRST does explain the underlying issues and how one could cope with them (e.g. the rt3200 would be a sensible upgrade for reasonable money, leaving the door open for SQM and some moderate future speed increases).
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[0] read, it's explicitly unsupported by OpenWrt 21.02.x and hasn't run well in 18.06.x or 19.07.x either, its prime has passed almost half a decade ago. Modern 802.11ac devices do provide significant performance improvements at all fronts, WAN speed, luci interactivity, VPN throughput, wireless performance and range, not to forget 5 GHz support and 'comfortable' amounts of flash and RAM.
[1] and even more by enabling software flow-offloading, but that comes at its own share of penalties (no sqm, no traffic accounting, often weird quirks and issues).
[2] yes, I do still own one myself
Sure, but my point isn't that I'm not getting 250 Mbit and being sad about it. My point is that I'm surprised to see, that NAT performance seems to have degraded by a factor of 2-3x after a firmware upgrade.
The other poster said that he was able to squeeze 200 Mbit out of it with 19.x. I don't even need that much and would be totally happy with 100 Mbit. I found 60 Mbit that I was getting with 19.x to be acceptable. Even 25 Mbit is fine for the devices I have connected to it (kitchen appliance, vacuum cleaner), but it simply kind of sucks...
So, I thought that maybe I misconfigured something obvious and wanted to know what the others are getting. To my mind there is no reason for performance to degrade dramatically over time if no more computing is being done than before, and there is enough RAM, if the components are halfway well-written.
I wasn't using a special config just disabled everything ipv6 related, ping and latency were good but probably during full bandwith download it might suffer while browsing webpages on other devices but it was okay on the same system I was running wired not wireless.
I don't suggest you to solder the caps, just take a look at them first.
Don't know your needs exactly but if you want half/Gigabit wire speeds and ~80Mbit 20Mhz wireless speeds why don't you just bridge the whole 1043nd to your vodafone router? You might even mix with half bridge some LAN ports and bridge a 2nd SSID for example?
EDIT just noticed you used Wireless instead of Wired? For wireless @40Mhz you might get passed to 100Mbit, but I rather have a stable/fast lower wifi bandwith.