RT-AC68U Problem with Traffic Monitor

[relayer35]

Just picked up a new RT-AC68U, after years of running various routers with Tomato firmware. Put Merlin 380.59 on it. Very happy with it so far.

I'm just having one issue with the traffic monitor. It seems to be reporting as much download as upload. For instance, yesterday (6/11) it reported 11.97 GB download, and 11.12 upload. I know this to be incorrect for a couple of reasons. First of all, I also have IP monitoring enabled and if I add up the data usage for all of the devices on 6/11 it comes to 9.72 down, and 1.11 up. If I look at what my ISP, Cox reports that I used, they say I used 12.37 total (up and down). I am seeing the same pattern for today's usage as well (though I don't have Cox's number to back that up yet).

When I look at the global real-time graphic chart, it always shows the same amount of upload as download, so something is seriously not right. Has anyone else encountered this?

I have a lot of devices attached. There are five different gigabit ethernet switches, and three other wi-fi access points, and anywhere between 25 and 35 devices at one time. For what it's worth, I had a problem with the bandwidth monitor on my old router, using Tomato as well. It was a different problem, and I found that my IP traffic was correct, and matched pretty much to what Cox was reporting I used. I believe the IP traffic is the same here as well, and my understanding is that the bandwidth monitoring stuff was pretty much lifted wholesale from Tomato anyway. Only problem is, unlike Tomato, the IP traffic does not show me a total and I have to pretty much add it all up myself.

Am I the only one seeing this anomaly?

 

[RMerlin]

Disable NAT acceleration.

 

[relayer35]

Disable NAT acceleration.

It is already disabled.

 

[RMerlin]

Asus' closed source traffic monitoring was broken in their most recent models. That code being closed source, I can't fix it, so best I could do was to implement a workaround in those newer models, to bypass that broken code.

No one reported having the same issue in the older models such as the RT-AC68U, so I didn't touch it. I guess it's possible that it suffers from the same issue, but no one else reported it so far.

 

[relayer35]

Asus' closed source traffic monitoring was broken in their most recent models. That code being closed source, I can't fix it, so best I could do was to implement a workaround in those newer models, to bypass that broken code.

No one reported having the same issue in the older models such as the RT-AC68U, so I didn't touch it. I guess it's possible that it suffers from the same issue, but no one else reported it so far.

Strange, looking at the real time graph I can definitely see that the router is reporting almost all my traffic as both upload and download. So it's evidently counting something incorrectly somewhere. The "reception" values seem to match my ISP counter for total traffic pretty closely, and it also seems to match the IP traffic if I add it all up for each device. The numbers have been consistent for four days in a row now. It's almost as if the Reception values indicate the total, and the Transmission values indicate the download minus the upload. (And thus the total indicates a totally meaningless number). Strange. Would love to see totals for the IP traffic, as then I could just ignore the overall traffic monitor altogether.

 

[RMerlin]

Strange, looking at the real time graph I can definitely see that the router is reporting almost all my traffic as both upload and download. So it's evidently counting something incorrectly somewhere. The "reception" values seem to match my ISP counter for total traffic pretty closely, and it also seems to match the IP traffic if I add it all up for each device. The numbers have been consistent for four days in a row now. It's almost as if the Reception values indicate the total, and the Transmission values indicate the download minus the upload. (And thus the total indicates a totally meaningless number). Strange. Would love to see totals for the IP traffic, as then I could just ignore the overall traffic monitor altogether.

I'll disable the switch-based traffic monitoring for all models, it's possible that it's broken for all models. So far Asus hasn't addressed the issue, and that code is closed source, so they're the only ones that can do anything about it...

 

[MarkRH]

Yeah mine does this same thing with CTF enabled. Here's the daily: http://i.imgur.com/LFxrk5e.png

Here's what 24-hour looks like for WAN: http://i.imgur.com/4mz0RtR.png where upload and download are almost the same. Wired looks correct though: http://i.imgur.com/NIAa7Bg.png

I have Statistics enabled and that has the correct value for upload and download.

 

[relayer35]

Yeah mine does this same thing with CTF enabled. Here's the daily: http://i.imgur.com/LFxrk5e.png

Here's what 24-hour looks like for WAN: http://i.imgur.com/4mz0RtR.png where upload and download are almost the same. Wired looks correct though: http://i.imgur.com/NIAa7Bg.png

I have Statistics enabled and that has the correct value for upload and download.

My understanding is CTF is disabled if I Hardware Acceleration Off, which I do (which is automatically turned off if IP traffic is enabled).

 

[Grievous Angel]

Strange, looking at the real time graph I can definitely see that the router is reporting almost all my traffic as both upload and download. So it's evidently counting something incorrectly somewhere.

This is maddening. I'm seeing something very similar. I noticed today on my traffic history where my last couple of monthly upload counts shot up to rival download numbers--it's never been that way months and months prior. Per-IP didn't help much since I never made them static, so I thought I'd go through the process today of making sure everything I had got a reserved DHCP address (to see if I could track a rogue/bad player uploading stuff). At some point I decided to reset the whole router. Anyway, I'm back in business with per-IP monitoring, with a complete DHCP table configured for static IPs, with the data going to a USB drive, on a freshly restored router.

After watching it for the entire day, it still seems as if something is wrong--my daily totals do NOT equal the per-IP totals. The per-IP totals look legit..the daily totals do not. I've attached screen snips of each for one day (July 7) to illustrate the mismatch.

If this is just a known bug, I can live with it, but if anyone knows of a fix I would like to resolve if possible. I have per-IP monitoring enabled, so hardware acceleration should be disabled. I'm on the latest version of Merlin, on an AC3100. Any advice would be appreciated!

 

[MarkRH]

You probably have the 4 Gig upload spike bug with every 4 Gig of download. Usually visible in the 24hour section. I was getting this with Merlin's 384.5 firmware. The latest ASUS Firmware does not do it and Merlin's current 384.6 Alpha has corrected it, on the RT-AC68U anyway.

 

[Grievous Angel]

You probably have the 4 Gig upload spike bug with every 4 Gig of download. Usually visible in the 24hour section. I was getting this with Merlin's 384.5 firmware. The latest ASUS Firmware does not do it and Merlin's current 384.6 Alpha has corrected it, on the RT-AC68U anyway.

Well this makes a lot of sense. I've attached a screen shot of the 24 hour section, I assume these "spikes" are what's causing it. Correct? I guess the answer is to wait it out. I'm glad to hear it's just a bug and not actual data I'm uploading.

 

[Gerald Boutin]

Well this makes a lot of sense. I've attached a screen shot of the 24 hour section, I assume these "spikes" are what's causing it. Correct? I guess the answer is to wait it out. I'm glad to hear it's just a bug and not actual data I'm uploading.

This matches what I also see in the Upload daily amounts. However, since I updated to 384.5 on May 27, in addition to the large Upload spikes, for days where there are no spikes, the Upload amount is only reported as an extremely low amount. Note that my typical daily upload amounts historically have been in the 0.1 to 0.5 GB / per day amount. After the update on May 27, the Upload daily amount is reported as much less than 0.1 GB per day.

Perhaps there are two issues going on. Has anyone noticed if the latest Asus version or the 384.6 Alpha version have the problem with low reported upload amounts on spikeless days?

==
Gerald

-------DATE ----------------------DNLOAD----------------------UPLOAD

 

[wesbez]

I’ve got this and its especially noticeable when I’m using IPTV watching BT tv’s 4K channel. The data is counted as upload data. The channel will skip and one of the processors will spike to 100%. A small fast 384.5xxx update to address this will be much appreciated

 

[ColinTaylor]

I’ve got this and its especially noticeable when I’m using IPTV watching BT tv’s 4K channel. The data is counted as upload data. The channel will skip and one of the processors will spike to 100%. A small fast 384.5xxx update to address this will be much appreciated

As I explained to your other post this is a cosmetic bug that doesn't effect the CPU usage.

 

[wesbez]

Sorry I’m not as clued up on this. I feel silly now.

 

[Grievous Angel]

You probably have the 4 Gig upload spike bug with every 4 Gig of download. Usually visible in the 24hour section. I was getting this with Merlin's 384.5 firmware. The latest ASUS Firmware does not do it and Merlin's current 384.6 Alpha has corrected it, on the RT-AC68U anyway.

Updating to Merlin 384.6 seems to have corrected it.