Slow transfer rates from HDD attached to RT-AC68

[n0ns3ns3]

The setup:
RT-AC68 FW384.3
The router CPU is overclocked to 1000MHz to improve USB Storage performance with 2.4GHz wi-fi enabled.

The problem:
trying to transfer files from USB HDD attached to the router to a computer over 1GB link results in inconsistent speed and complete failure with very large files over 10GB.
The transfer starts at ~40MB/s and drops to around 5MB/s after few seconds.

Additional info:
smbd takes 100% of one core and stays there regardless of settings.
I have not changed anything in file sharing config since the initial setup couple of years ago and it was last time i measured the transfer speeds.
Stock router - ~40MB/s.
Overclocked router ~70MB/s
So it is hard to tell when the problem started.

I tried to change some setting in the smbd config (post smbd start as the FW overwrites the config when starting smbd) without any changes.

Any suggestion on how to fix or troubleshoot the issue would be appreciated .

 

[skeal]

The setup:
RT-AC68 FW384.3
The router CPU is overclocked to 1000MHz to improve USB Storage performance with 2.4GHz wi-fi enabled.

The problem:
trying to transfer files from USB HDD attached to the router to a computer over 1GB link results in inconsistent speed and complete failure with very large files over 10GB.
The transfer starts at ~40MB/s and drops to around 5MB/s after few seconds.

Additional info:
smbd takes 100% of one core and stays there regardless of settings.
I have not changed anything in file sharing config since the initial setup couple of years ago and it was last time i measured the transfer speeds.
Stock router - ~40MB/s.
Overclocked router ~70MB/s
So it is hard to tell when the problem started.

I tried to change some setting in the smbd config (post smbd start as the FW overwrites the config when starting smbd) without any changes.

Any suggestion on how to fix or troubleshoot the issue would be appreciated .

Have you tried the "Force as Master Browser" setting in sharing settings in the routers gui?

 

[n0ns3ns3]

Yes, same behavior.

 

[hoang51]

What's the file system format of the USB HDD, just out of curiosity? As for any suggestion to troubleshoot, would you happen to have a USB flash drive on hand so that you can format it to different file system formats that your Asus router can accept, such as FAT32, NTFS, EXT3 to copy a 10 GB file to it? I would also suggest attaching the USB HDD to a Windows PC running checkdisk/scandisk on the USB HDD to see if there are any minor errors found and could be fixed.

 

[n0ns3ns3]

What's the file system format of the USB HDD, just out of curiosity? As for any suggestion to troubleshoot, would you happen to have a USB flash drive on hand so that you can format it to different file system formats that your Asus router can accept, such as FAT32, NTFS, EXT3 to copy a 10 GB file to it? I would also suggest attaching the USB HDD to a Windows PC running checkdisk/scandisk on the USB HDD to see if there are any minor errors found and could be fixed.

The disk is formatted as EXT4.
Changing the disk is a bit tricky as there are quite a few things on it including SWAP, configurations and other programs like transmission installed on it.
Though I do want to clone the disk to another one to eliminate HW problem.

I did use the e2fsck to verify the disk is OK.

 

[Adamm]

The setup:
RT-AC68 FW384.3
The router CPU is overclocked to 1000MHz to improve USB Storage performance with 2.4GHz wi-fi enabled.

The problem:
trying to transfer files from USB HDD attached to the router to a computer over 1GB link results in inconsistent speed and complete failure with very large files over 10GB.
The transfer starts at ~40MB/s and drops to around 5MB/s after few seconds.

Additional info:
smbd takes 100% of one core and stays there regardless of settings.
I have not changed anything in file sharing config since the initial setup couple of years ago and it was last time i measured the transfer speeds.
Stock router - ~40MB/s.
Overclocked router ~70MB/s
So it is hard to tell when the problem started.

I tried to change some setting in the smbd config (post smbd start as the FW overwrites the config when starting smbd) without any changes.

Any suggestion on how to fix or troubleshoot the issue would be appreciated .

Try tweaking the buffer settings which I have posted here and see if your results improve.

 

[n0ns3ns3]

Try tweaking the buffer settings which I have posted here and see if your results improve.

Tried the 3rd option before posting.

 

[n0ns3ns3]

I replaced the HDD with another one and it behaves exactly the same.
Upgrade to 384.4 did not change anything.
I'd really like to avoid re-initializing the router, so more ideas to fix/troubleshoot would be appreciated

 

[n0ns3ns3]

Another update:
Tried another USB 3 to SATA enclosure to completely eliminate the storage issue (with the HDD change mentioned above).
Tried to reset the router - no significant change.

Next steps reverting to the stock Asus FW or really old one if the stock does not help.

 

[PeterT]

Any chance that you just have too much happening on the router, and that the swap I/o is interfering with the data transfer?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

[n0ns3ns3]

Any chance that you just have too much happening on the router, and that the swap I/o is interfering with the data transfer?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

I had this idea, so I restarted the router and stopped services like transmission that could cause something like this.
Resetting the router to defaults = no SWAP and no features beside samba enabled.
For now, I managed to get ~30MB/s reads and ~25MB/s writes.
That's way too slow compared to the ~70MB/s it was doing.
And it's way too slow for 1Gbps fiber internet connection (~930Mbps actual download) which can do over 110MB/s.
It means sometimes it's 3-4times faster to download things from internet than use the router as the file server.

 

[RussellInCincinnati]

It would be great to know your transfer speed with stock Asus firmware. So we could determine if this forum is the right place to discuss your desire for better performance of the Asus WiFi router as a nearly featureless file server.

 

[n0ns3ns3]

It would be great to know your transfer speed with stock Asus firmware. So we could determine if this forum is the right place to discuss your desire for better performance of the Asus WiFi router as a nearly featureless file server.

As I mentioned in my initial post, the transfer speeds measured after initial setup on Merlin's FW were ~30MB/s stock clocks and ~70MB/s CPU overclocked.

I shared the results here:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/o...rt-ac68u-and-rt-n66u.28043/page-6#post-247611