Asus RTN66U CPU 100% with USB drive attached???

[RSwipeCA]

Hi all. Here's my issue.

For the past 18 months or so my RTN66U has been performing faultlessly. We have multiple wireless and wired devices in the house, and never have had an issue. About a year ago I attached a USB HDD to the USB port on the router. It's full of movie files. It has all been working perfect for ages. I can stream from the attached USB drive to PS3, pc or smart tv no problem. 1080p files are perfect. I can see the attached USB drive on all my pc's, and read and write to the drive no problem.

Over the past few weeks, we have had our net connectivity dropping out at different times. We'd be watching netflix for instance and the connection would die.

I started to check all the usual things like firmware, physical connection, virus, various reboots and resets. And it would be good for a day or so, then the net would become very slow, almost to the point of unusable. I also notice that trying to log into the RTN66U GUI would take ages.

I also noticed that the CPU usage report on the router was at 100% constantly, and the RAM usage was at least 50% or more when the router was essentially idle????? That's when noticed that if I removed the USB HDD from the back of the router the net connection would return, and the CPU Usage would return to 1% and the RAM usage to say 15%?? So I formatted the HDD as a precaution ( NTFS - as it was from day one ), and then copied over almost a TB of video files again. Mounted the HDD in the RTN66U and the moment I did that the CPU and RAM usage went through the roof again. As far as I can tell the HDD is working perfectly. It connects to my W7 pc no problem, all the files are there and it serves the movie perfectly. I was on the phone with ASUS and they asked me connect a different USB drive to the router. I had a 16GB thumb drive. Stuck that in and again the same issue - CPU goes straight to 100% Usage, and RAM usage increases to 75%!!??? All this was working perfect for over a year?? This is a great router, and even with this irritating glitch at the moment, it is still blazing fast and copes with everything the six of us in this house can throw at it.

Does anyone have any ideas? I really do like having the USB Movie HDD attached to the router, it means I can stream to whatever I want whenever I like, without having to leave a pc on. If its developed a fault then so be it.

It was running the 282 1071 firmware with the issue. I tried the Merlin firmware - no difference. Its now running the latest 376 2524 Asus firmware - still has the issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Nullity]

Try turning off the router for 30 minutes.

If you did not restore the factory-default settings when you upgraded the firmware, that is something you can do now, just to be sure. It can be found in Advanced Settings->Administration->Restore/Save/Upload Setting->Restore

 

[RSwipeCA]

Thanks Nullity. I will try that and report back.

 

[RMerlin]

The media server is probably crashing on a corrupted video file. Try putting only a portion of your files at once to isolate which file is causing it.

 

[RSwipeCA]

Hi all. I did what you suggested Nullity, still the same issue.

I will try your suggestion Merlin, I can see what you're saying. How would that explain the same issue with the 16gb usb thumb drive though? That just had various files on it, no movie files. I will format the HDD drive and try it without files. I have hundreds on there, finding the one file that's sending the media player skitts could be problematic.

Thanks for your suggestions guys, will report back .

 

[RSwipeCA]

Ok so. I formatted the usb HDD. Removed all files. Plugged it in to the router and mounted. The CPU usage meter stayed at 0%.

I dismounted, then added one movie file and remounted. The CPU meter stayed at 100% for about thirty seconds then settled down to 0%! Great.

So, whats the deal here? I added all these files as they are now at the same time roughly a year ago. When I did it that time ( the first time ) I don't remember losing connectivity, or having a very sluggish network or noticing the cpu usage maxing out in the router. So why would it be doing it now. I added one file like I said, and the cpu usage maxed then settled down within thirty secs. Does that mean that it is indexing or parsing all the files that are added to the media server drive? If it takes thirty secs to do one, then it would take ages with almost a TB of movies. But again, it never did this before. Right now I am giving the HDD a thorough slow format in W7. I will then add the movie files again as I did a year ago and see what happens. That will be several hours before I can try again. Is there a media server setting that is telling the router to constantly index the files or something similar??

Thanks for you help guys, will keep you posted.

 

[RMerlin]

Ok so. I formatted the usb HDD. Removed all files. Plugged it in to the router and mounted. The CPU usage meter stayed at 0%.

I dismounted, then added one movie file and remounted. The CPU meter stayed at 100% for about thirty seconds then settled down to 0%! Great.

So, whats the deal here? I added all these files as they are now at the same time roughly a year ago. When I did it that time ( the first time ) I don't remember losing connectivity, or having a very sluggish network or noticing the cpu usage maxing out in the router. So why would it be doing it now. I added one file like I said, and the cpu usage maxed then settled down within thirty secs. Does that mean that it is indexing or parsing all the files that are added to the media server drive? If it takes thirty secs to do one, then it would take ages with almost a TB of movies. But again, it never did this before. Right now I am giving the HDD a thorough slow format in W7. I will then add the movie files again as I did a year ago and see what happens. That will be several hours before I can try again. Is there a media server setting that is telling the router to constantly index the files or something similar??

Thanks for you help guys, will keep you posted.

A few months ago Asus enhanced minidlna to generate thumbnails. I suspect your last tested version was before they did that change.

 

[RSwipeCA]

Yeah that kind of makes sense. This all started a few months back.

Last night whilst the USB HDD was being formatted on my pc ( ie not connected to the router ) we lost network again. All the network indicators were flashing a lot, and it took ages to connect through to the router interface screen. I checked with the wired and wireless users in the house, and nobody was streaming, or doing anything intensive. There is something definitely weird going on. It happened after streaming wirelessly a couple of hours of a tv show through netflix. I am wondering if the router is failing when it gets hot? It has always got pretty hot when its working. And was pretty hot last night when things started going south.

 

[RSwipeCA]

I bit the bullet and bought a new router. I got the RT-AC68U. Set up the network, plugged in the USB HDD with all the movies on it and it works perfect.

Its running the 376 1663 firmware.

So, I am guess that 66U was for some reason unable to cope with heavy usage and or had developed a fault. either way, it has been for the past few months a pain in the butt.

Thanks for all your help guys.

 

[TMcGuire17]

Following closely

Im experiencing the same/similar thing. New RT-N66U Merlin Beta 2 firmware (nice additions Merlin) I have not been able to get the usb-cloud/drive features to work even REMOTELY as expected because it kills the router. I wiped my drive plugged it in and cpu was fine. Try to transfer files by dragging and dropping/or ftp and gone! Router kicks the drive off. Have to unplug and replug. Other time 100% CPU usage. Ive got about a week of fidgeting with this thing and can honestly say Ive never had router issues like this. Other than Merlin and this forum good luck finding any assistance!

p.s. first post so "Hey everybody"

 

[RSwipeCA]

Yeah. There is definitely something not right. I have been goofing around with this issue for quite a while now. I only recently noticed it was apparently effected by the USB HDD connectivity. Bottom line, I have 6 people in the house all coming to me saying the 'net is down again'. I had to go grab another router. Like I said above, its all good now with the RT AC68U, go figure?

I am still waiting on ASUS calling me back.... I called them three days ago, and they said they were interested in the issue and would let me know.

Question. Does the 66u have a two year warranty? I have my receipt, bought just over a year ago.

Good luck fixing it. If you find anything that works dont forget to post!

 

[tallytr]

I have exactly the same issue.
Removing my 2TB Ext. HDD lowers CPU Core 1 usage to around 7% from 100%.
My router also crashes once/week.
I've disconnected the USB HDD and deleted the minidlna folder.
Remounted HDD, took around 30min of Media Server scanning, during scanning CPU shows 100% usage, after that Media Server status changed to Idle and the CPU usage went down to ~7%.
I'll have to monitor that more...

 

[ml70]

Minidlna tends to use all available cpu while scanning, you can lessen its impact by rescheduling its priority to as low as possible

admin@RT-AC66U:/$ renice -n +19 PID

PID is the process id of the minidlna process which you get from command "ps". You can do "ps [m]inidlna" to only get pid's for minidlna processes, if the list is too long to fit your display.

You don't need to renice all of them, just the active one taking all cpu. With command "top" you see easily which one it is.

 

[martin3dsc]

running RT-AC66-u Merlin 380.59_0 2* 2Tb drives still same problem.
After power off/on the router execute fsck and that takes a time for 2Tb drives.
during fsck cpu 100% mem 64%
after fsck cpu 14% mem 41%
media server is OFF no minidlna active
The RT-AC66-u not suitable as NAS
the router is NOT DOWN , file transfer internet radio is running.
ssh and http to 192.168.1.1 gives no connection
Is there after 2 years a solution?