RT-AC86U Ram Usage

[Jik]

Hello to all.

I have recently purchased a new RT-AC86U and installed Merlin on it straight away successfully. One thing I notice is that the ram usage seems to be quite high, I have no scripts installed and about 17 clients connected, but the ram is showing about 75% used, which seems to be more than my old 68u which had less ram. I just wondered if this is normal for the 86U? Also can anyone advise me on whether the newer ASUS RT-AX82U would be worth purchasing over the RT-AC86U, as there is a good offer on at the moment and I can still return the RT-AC86U.

Thanks in advance for any help on this

 

[Jeffrey Young]

There is a ton of info in the forums on this. Just because the router is reporting ram use as high does not mean that all the ram is used for programs. It is likely that the ram is being used for cache. When the router needs ram for programs, the cache will give it back.

log into the router via ssh and use the free command to see what is really available.

 

[El Indalo]

I've also recently moved from the AC68U to AC86U and my RAM usage is 71%, using the free command I see I have plenty of memory!

 

[Jik]

Thanks for the info on the free command

 

[cooloutac]

Hello to all.

I have recently purchased a new RT-AC86U and installed Merlin on it straight away successfully. One thing I notice is that the ram usage seems to be quite high, I have no scripts installed and about 17 clients connected, but the ram is showing about 75% used, which seems to be more than my old 68u which had less ram. I just wondered if this is normal for the 86U? Also can anyone advise me on whether the newer ASUS RT-AX82U would be worth purchasing over the RT-AC86U, as there is a good offer on at the moment and I can still return the RT-AC86U.

Thanks in advance for any help on this

Its normal. I noticed the same thing compared to the ac66u_b1 and ax58u. It also runs 10 degrees hotter. no idea why. My ram usage would eventually creep to almost 90% with most main features disabled.

from my understanding only the ax88u and ax86u have aes-ni support for faster openvpn. I could be wrong and hopefully someone else chimes in, but if fast openvpn is not an issue, the ax58u is pretty stable and should be supported for a long time and will give you at least 50MBs openvpn speed. I'm kind of weary of the stuff marketed as gaming after my experience with ac86u, I had nothing but trouble with it.

 

[El Indalo]

I'm kind of weary of the stuff marketed as gaming after my experience with ac86u, I had nothing but trouble with it.

I was wary when I say the router being advertised as for gaming, then thought it was probably just a bit of extra marketing. I haven't had many problems with the router yet. I have the "Gear Accelerator" off and haven't touched anything else under the "Game" tab. What problems did you have?

 

[cooloutac]

I was wary when I say the router being advertised as for gaming, then thought it was probably just a bit of extra marketing. I haven't had many problems with the router yet. I have the "Gear Accelerator" off and haven't touched anything else under the "Game" tab. What problems did you have?

lol where do I begin.... lots of errors in the syslog. the most major were router crahses. DCD crashes if I had ai protection, qos or traffic analyzer on when running a vpn client. but eventually the 2.4ghz channel was dropping everything on the network in the end forcing me to reboot the router and I returned it.

Here is a thread I created that documents some of the different issues I was having. I kept posting to it.

brand new AC86u has a crashlog. what does any of this mean? | SmallNetBuilder Forums (snbforums.com)


If you scroll down my thread you will see how as new errors were appearing I was documenting them there. I've had the ac66u_b1, which I now went back to, and never had an error in 3 years and still don't. Running the same config I tried on the ac86u, with and without aimesh.

The issue of the 2.4ghz channel dropping out and eventually totally dying seemed to be a common issue but it was assumed was fixed in later revisions and with 2020 manufacturing. In my case it didn't seem to be and I didn't want to take the chance especially with all the problems I was already having. I wasn't even going to buy the router but decided to take the chance and see if I got a 2020 version.

I might go back to the ax58u to extend my wireless since that seemed to be stable. I returned the ax58u for the faster openvpn speeds on the ac86u but now regret that decision. l found running vpn at the router is really only good for iot devices. Its best to use the vpn app for my android and windows devices, and my smart tv's don't really need to be on the vpn but I could still put one on it in case of emergency.