Hi there,
i'm trying around with a 3500L since some days. I tried DD-WRT and Tomato. Everywhere, i'm not able to get higher Tranfer Rates than 5MB/s. The Best results i got using DD-WRT with an ext2 Partition via Ftp.
So is the Transfer-Speed a problem of Hardware, cause maybe the USB-Port is not a USB 2.0, more a "higher than Usb1.1" Por, or is it a Software-Thing and i'm just using the wrong tools and cant wait for final Firmwares?
Greets, Cpt_Hero
I'm connected via Ethernet(Gigabit-Connection between PC and Router)... I have try'd a bit more, took an old HDD, fomatted it via SLAX with ext2 and now i'm having 6MB/s write, but only 2MB/s read... its a bit bizarr :D
During FTP-Transfer: CPU-Load: 2%, FreeRAM: 77%, Try'dHHDs: WDMyBook and an old USB-to-IDE HDD, all with ext2
Ok, i found out, that the vsftp goes @ 100% while transfering files... atm i'm at 10MB/s write, 6MB/s read. Why is the download speed slower than the upload speed?
i tried it with my PC and my Notebook, both having Gigabit-Cards, same results... No other Software is running... In my Eyes vsftpd is the Bottleneck, f.e. while running transmission, speed goes more down. So, maybe there is any "smaller" FTP-Server?
That's the same type thing I get Upload at 4.5MB/s, Download 6.5Mb/s. Using WinSCP directly logged into the router with Sata NTFS HD.
in my opinion it would be possible to raise the traffic speed by lowering the CPU-usage of vsftp...
i know Tomato for WRT3500L is still a Beta, but maybe someone (esp. Teddy_Baer) could tweak this a bit, to get a better Performance...
I will try on...
@BrandonC SCP is not a good test, the overhead that encryption adds, will kill performance. At work I ran tests with server to server copy through Gigabit, I couldn't get more than 15MB/s while smb transfers got to 70MB/s
@Cpt_hero have you checked if the correct usb modules are loaded, USB 2.0 is provided via "ehci_hcd", you can check the loaed modules by calling command:
lsmod
lsmod checked, ehci_hcd is running... like i said, vsftp gets 100% CPU-Load, maybe we have to think in this direction...
BTW: Thank you all for your Support!
You are testing with a large file right, not few smaller files?
High CPU load is a problem you always have with USB transfers. Try some older 2Ghz PC and see how much writing to a fast USB drive does to your CPU load, see:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1152200,00.asp
I connect 30Gb Seagate HDD with FAT32. I'm with latest dd-wrt firmware(big). I can't see my HDD. The interesting part is that with the old firmware(original firmware from netgear web site) i can see the hard and operate with him.
I connect Kingston 8Gb usb stick and there is no problems but to see it in Router settings - but i can't find it like network device.
Please help me to understand how to set it.
Hi, I have spotted this issue on both of my routers: Netgear WNDR3700 (running on stock firmware) and WNR3500L (running DD-WRT build 13972). With my WNDR3700 I tried copying some various files (from 1MB to 4GB) using SAMBA onto 1TB external HDD formatted with NTFS connected to the router. I must say that there was no much of a difference between copying these files over Wi-Fi or gigabit Ethernet, transfer speed was varying between 1MB/s and 3MB/s – surely it wasn't getting crazy :)
Although WNR3500L has slower CPU (referring to what Kong wrote about CPU usage) transfer speed was similar to the WNDR3700Â’s one when I was copying the same files onto 250GB external HDD formatted with FAT32 (since DD-WRT does not come with NTFS support) using FTP protocol.
I am getting a bit worried that if I want to get some decent transfer speeds I will have to go for a proper NAS box.
Cheers
I have just done a test with my wnr3500l. I get the following transfer speeds:
8MB/s write
6MB/s read
For my test I enabled proftpd.
Indeed the performance seems to be limited by the cpu speed.
After looking around a bit I saw no dd-wrt setup problems. From dd-wrts wiki you can see other routers have about the same speeds:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/USB_storage#Performance_Testing
[look at timing buffered read]
The only chance to get faster usb transfers would be to create a custom firmware with a different default scheduler. dmesg says the default scheduler is deadline:
squashfs: version 3.0 (2006/03/15) Phillip Lougher
io scheduler noop registered
io scheduler deadline registered (default)
HDLC line discipline: version $Revision: 4.8 $, maxframe=409
noop scheduler could be a bit faster.
this sounds really good! will we find someone to create a custom firmware? this would be an improvement to every USB-Firmware, so this should be in the interrest of every firmware creator...
Thanks Kong!
I don't really think it is worth the effort. Sometime ago I have tested different schedulers on regular PCs copying files from disks to disks. I doubt it would improve speeds by more than 10%.
I've just found another source that shows test results for the Asus RT-N16 which has the same Broadcom SOC:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1273035.html
Same performance.
The Datasheet for the 4718 claims, that the USB 2.0 is a high speed, I agree with that because 2.0 Full Speed would not be able to do 8MB/s
So I unless someone looks into the linux kernel usb ehci and usb-storage code there won't be a real speed improvement. I could imagine that tuning those modules would help raising the performance for the broadcom chip.
Some of comments are wrong.
Try command TOP via telnet or putty, during transfer.
Vsftpd transfer to usb ext3 about 3-6MB/s, cpu 70-88% vsftpd, 2-3% usb-storage.
Via smbd speed about same, even better, cpu 56-68% smbd, 2-3% usb-storage.
Same transfer to jffs via smbd : 320KB speed at 97% cpu used by smbd (!).
It looks like a smb or ftp not a weak chain. And usb also.
Tomato v1.28.9052 MIPSR2-beta23 K26 USB vpn3.6 , rt-n16.
take a look at this :
hdparm -tT /dev/sda4
/dev/sda4:
Timing cached reads: 202 MB in 2.03 seconds = 99.75 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 62 MB in 3.03 seconds = 20.46 MB/sec
There is no problem with a usb, disk format, and also a protocol used.
But what is it ?
mmm
Hi wld,
just look at top's output and you will see that sirq is around 50% which means, that the cpu is busy handling the ethernet interface interrupts, this is because network processing is done is software.