Asus RT-AC68W - Poor performance, even with 378.54

[jhedman2]

I've recently purchased an RT-AC68W so the device is brand new. Never could get Tomato to work at all so I tried Merlin. Personally I really like the fact that Merlin is so close to the factory firmware that the settings basically transfer over.

Anyway, on to my problem, the firmware installed perfectly well and I got everything configured easily. Everything on the WAN works great. Love the fact that the Merlin firmware has multiple fields for DNS servers on the DHCP settings for LAN connections. The factory doesn't. But the real issue is with performance. For some reason many websites work just fine and even my speed tests work very well, but when I try to access certain websites, the performance is incredibly slow. It's only certain websites, not all. The DNS lookups seem to work fine but the actual page rendering is extremely slow, if it ever completes.

This is with wired and wireless connections BTW. So for troubleshooting I've turned off basically every firewall feature, every AI feature, etc. No fix! So then I flashed the factory firmware and bam, the websites work just fine. So call me crazy, but it really seems as though something may be filtering my connections even though I've turned the settings off. For example, some of my P2P sites are terribly slow. Yes its questionable sites, but if I turn the filtering off, they should function like any site.

Anyone have any similar issues or ideas? I've reset both the router and the modem numerous times, hard and soft. I've switched between Asus firmware and Merlin multiple times. JFFS is enabled.

Thoughts, would love the help, I really want to use the Merlin code, has administrative benefits for sure.

Thanks in advance.

 

[RMerlin]

Since it's a new router, you might need to do a complete reset of your modem connection. Power off your modem for at least 10 minutes, then turn it back on. This will ensure that it will "forget" your previous router, and allocate a new lease to the current router.

Also make sure the cable between the modem and the router is Cat 5e or higher. Older Cat 5 cables won't be reliable due to the router's Gigabit interface (your previous router might have had only a 100 Mbits interface).

 

[chevyman142000]

Is the performance slow the whole time or just during the initial attempt to connect to a website?

 

[jhedman2]

Thanks for the replies. It's all the time for certain websites. Again, for some reason, it's not an issue for all websites, in fact some websites seem to perform incredibly well. Between my new Cisco cable modem (i just know Cisco products in and out for work), and the new router, i'm getting some incredible speeds both internally and with web traffic. Like I said, some of the sites like friendly torrent sites, etc, are terrible, they almost never complete loading. If it were a layer one issue between the router and the modem, it should be far more regular in occurrence.

I just realized one more thing that sucks about not running merlin, the stock Asus firmware doesn't let me label MAC addresses in my filter list. Has anyone found the file in the Asus OS that controls MAC filters? Funny thing is that when I installed the factory ROM over the Merlin ROM, it appended the existing labels to MAC addresses, but it won't let me do that manually. For example, it currently shows "00:01:02:03:04:04>LabelName". And it obviously works so I'd like to try and find the file and manually modify it via SSH.

Sounds like I might be the only person with the strange website behavior. Suppose if I get some time I can try to reset the router to factor defaults and try Merlin again, but something tells me that isn't it.

I also just noticed something else that blows my mind, can anyone tell me if this still happens with Merlin? I can't believe that something as simple as changing the contents of the MAC filter requires all WiFi clients to log out and back in. That's enough for me to want to send this router back. Can anyone confirm if this is the case with the new TPLink products? My old Linksys/Cisco E3200 didn't even do this.