GT-AXE16000 still not powerfull enough to handle Traffic Analyzer?

[rexet]

Hello SNB community,

I have a GT-AXE16000 as my main router (with the latest Merlin 388.2_2 firwmare) as well as a Zenwifi ET12 set up as an AiMesh node (wifi 6Ghz backhaul).
My main computer is wired to the ET12 node and I get a solid 1750mbps download speed. If I enable the Traffic Analyzer feature in the AXE16000, it drops to 1250mbps.
I know these kind of features are stealing some CPU ressources decreasing speed performance but come on, the GT-AXE16000 is the latest flagship product with a 2Ghz quad core!
Looking at the ressources status, CPU core load don't even reach 10% even with Traffic Analyzer turned on.
What am I missing here?

Thanks

 

[tgl]

I have a GT-AXE16000 as my main router (with the latest Merlin 388.2_2 firwmare) as well as a Zenwifi ET12 set up as an AiMesh node (wifi 6Ghz backhaul).
My main computer is wired to the ET12 node and I get a solid 1750mbps download speed. If I enable the Traffic Analyzer feature in the AXE16000, it drops to 1250mbps.

I don't have one of those, but that sounds right in line with ASUS' usual engineering practice. You can get the claimed line rate as long as you don't enable any features that the NAT-acceleration hardware can't handle. But they don't put in a CPU beefy enough to handle packet inspection at line rate.

ASUS aren't the only sinners in this area; I see similar behavior on my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X gear, for example. If you want better results, you need to spend $$$$ on business-grade router hardware, or go the DIY route with a reasonably beefy PC running pfsense or similar.

 

[drinkingbird]

Hello SNB community,

I have a GT-AXE16000 as my main router (with the latest Merlin 388.2_2 firwmare) as well as a Zenwifi ET12 set up as an AiMesh node (wifi 6Ghz backhaul).
My main computer is wired to the ET12 node and I get a solid 1750mbps download speed. If I enable the Traffic Analyzer feature in the AXE16000, it drops to 1250mbps.
I know these kind of features are stealing some CPU ressources decreasing speed performance but come on, the GT-AXE16000 is the latest flagship product with a 2Ghz quad core!
Looking at the ressources status, CPU core load don't even reach 10% even with Traffic Analyzer turned on.
What am I missing here?

Thanks

Enabling traffic analyzer disables some of the hardware acceleration for routing, that's what you're missing. That will cut your speed way down.

Also traffic analyzer is known to be inaccurate since the hardware forwarding that is still enabled causes it to miss a lot. So to get it truly accurate, you'd have to disable all hardware acceleration and you'll be down under 500 mbit at that point.

It is a quad core ARM CPU, by no means "powerful". Plus each of these processes (routing, traffic analysis, etc) only uses a single core.

 

[drinkingbird]

I don't have one of those, but that sounds right in line with ASUS' usual engineering practice. You can get the claimed line rate as long as you don't enable any features that the NAT-acceleration hardware can't handle. But they don't put in a CPU beefy enough to handle packet inspection at line rate.

ASUS aren't the only sinners in this area; I see similar behavior on my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X gear, for example. If you want better results, you need to spend $$$$ on business-grade router hardware, or go the DIY route with a reasonably beefy PC running pfsense or similar.

Honestly it is across the board. Top of the line Cisco Nexus switches can switch traffic in 1/8 microsecond if you don't enable anything, 1/4 microsecond if you enable some basic stuff, and several microseconds if you start doing QoS etc. Same for their routers, the more stuff you enable and use, the less performance you get. That's just the nature of hardware acceleration, it is designed to accelerate specific scenarios. The fastest generic CPU in the world is not going to rival an ASIC in performance, but to use that ASIC, you need to limit what you're doing.

 

[Feistypy]

Considering that the CPU load isn't hitting even 10%, I wonder if the bottleneck is somewhere else. Have you tried checking the firmware logs or reaching out to customer support? Sometimes the issue might be a software one, rather than hardware. A firmware update or even a rollback could potentially solve the problem.
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