So I figured I would try out DD-wrt for my new nighthawk after I used the stock firmware for a while and I love it! Except for one thing my USB transfer speed is less than half going from netgear firmware to the Kong 23270. I used to get around 60MBs transfer with the stock firmware via smb share now its about 20MBs, I'm using a usb 3.0 drive formatted ext3 that is self powered. Is there any way to maybe mount it differently or change some settings I'm not seeing or is this just the limits of running a heavier linux on the router?
I also noticed cpu usage hits 100% when transfering.
I assume when you did the usb tests with netgear firmware you used a different filesystem. Netgear ships with a highly optimized closed source driver for fat/ntfs. As we have no license for that we cannot include it. In addition to that, did you test read or write throughput? Due to the way the network driver is designed read is slower than write. The highest throughput I measured is around 40MB/s write speed, read is about 25% slower.
The 100% cpu load on one core is expected as usb consumes a lot of cpu power.
Yea it was ntfs I formatted to ext3 figured it would be faster since on my wndr3700 with openwrt ext3 was almost twice as fast as ntfs. I only tested the write on netgear firmware on ddwrt my read is 18MB/s and write is 22MB/s.
One more thing that's worth mentioning, if you enabled access restrictions, qos, firewall logging, the cpu load for firewalling increases and therefore throughput will decrease.