spdMerlin spdMerlin - Automated speedtests with graphs

[Jack Yaz]

On my RT-AX88U, I'm not worried yet since the router seems to work just fine. I think it's strange that every hour I loose about 4-6MB of memory. Another 24h and my routers main memory will be used up and everything is going to the swap file. This is not normal behavior and shouldn't happen.

Run htop, sort by memory and keep an eye on which process(es) increment

 

[L&LD]

On my RT-AX88U, I'm not worried yet since the router seems to work just fine. I think it's strange that every hour I loose about 4-6MB of memory. Another 24h and my routers main memory will be used up and everything is going to the swap file. This is not normal behavior and shouldn't happen.

Actually, that is exactly what should happen. Use all the RAM for the job on hand (if needed), swap everything else out to make the current task as fast as possible.

Of course, I'm assuming that your router will properly swap/release RAM as needed. Let's see.

 

[Mutzli]

Run htop, sort by memory and keep an eye on which process(es) increment

I uninstalled it yesterday and rebooted the router. Now it seems stable again with 324MB of free memory for ~12h. I'll reinstall it again later this week and track its memory usage with htop.

 

[L&LD]

I uninstalled it yesterday and rebooted the router. Now it seems stable again with 324MB of free memory for ~12h. I'll reinstall it again later this week and track its memory usage with htop.

Are you having any issues with the low RAM reported while it was used? You may be worrying about nothing, IMO.

 

[owine]

Any possibility to tie this in with the manual bandwidth fields for Adaptive QoS? i.e. run a manual speed test with the tool and it will repopulate the bandwidth settings for Adaptive QoS.

 

[Gatsu]

Any possibility to tie this in with the manual bandwidth fields for Adaptive QoS? i.e. run a manual speed test with the tool and it will repopulate the bandwidth settings for Adaptive QoS.

Yes, u can read the values from script, then use nvram set qos_ibw, nvram set qos_obw settings for entering speeds (download and upload) and then restarting qos service (I wrote script for that, but I'm beginner so it is very very ugly )

I'm using mobile (LTE) for my main connection ( large fluctuations in speeds ) and using FreshJR Adaptive QOS (doesn't work with automatic setting).

 

[Jack Yaz]

Any possibility to tie this in with the manual bandwidth fields for Adaptive QoS? i.e. run a manual speed test with the tool and it will repopulate the bandwidth settings for Adaptive QoS.

I can do that, easy enough

 

[gattaca]

Installed on an RT-AC86U with several of the other amtm tooling items. Looks great!
My one pointer is to consider standardizing the graphics UNITS to commonly used units: ms = milliseconds, us=microseconds, MB/s=MegaBytes/s, mb/s=Megabit/sec, GB/s=GigaBytes/s, Gb/s=Gigabits/s. I do like that you spelled out Mbit/sec to avoid that often confusion. I'll keep an eye on the pCPU and pRAM use over the next few days. You guys are doing a great job building these very useful scripts and tooling!

I'm sure this one will be voted to be added to the amtm "ASUS Tooling" install portal!
The only one that I think a lot of people would love to have is the ability to script saving and then restoring the dhcp/IP assignments automatically. That's the biggest pain I still have.

Thanks so much! Again, AWESOME job and tooling! Later.

 

[Marnik]

Thank you Jack Yaz

Great tools you have conceived and are tampering with. I can only hope for more interesting tools.
Keep it coming as many like your thinking. (As many only wish what you have.)

I Installed spdmerlin in my AC86U with an account of 150/150 fiber.

Just a heads up, with the excitement of using your tool I fried my 16G USB stick on USB2.
(2 partitions - 1GB ext3 for router services - 15GB fat32 simple smb storage)
I am to blame here as I was doing constant tests to try to get my speed rates up to my service rate.
(Maybe just a warning to others to take it easy on the demands of your creation.)

With my tests I was unable to reach close to my actual speeds. 120p/70d/30u
As this software is on the router I assumed it would use my main non VPN service.
I found out that was not the case as I had 2 vpn clients running with YazFi.
I turned both clients off and finally had actual download and ping speeds at actual speed.
The upload speed was better but still at 60Mbps. ???

Also what I have concluded is that 'spdmerlin' is not VPN friendly. I tried to get a distant preference
list in an area I use frequently but was unable to. I can only assume that the "speedtest-cli"
software may have this as a limit. I have tried to dedicate the whole router to a vpn server again with
no success. I am able to surf via browser or using an app to a vpn server to achieve this but not
with the router using spdmerlin. So I am stuck with only real local preferences. Can this be changed?

Also what is the option "6. Toggle single connection mode"?

Thanks again for your spectacular dedication and skills.

Marnik

 

[Jack Yaz]

Thank you Jack Yaz

Great tools you have conceived and are tampering with. I can only hope for more interesting tools.
Keep it coming as many like your thinking. (As many only wish what you have.)

I Installed spdmerlin in my AC86U with an account of 150/150 fiber.

Just a heads up, with the excitement of using your tool I fried my 16G USB stick on USB2.
(2 partitions - 1GB ext3 for router services - 15GB fat32 simple smb storage)
I am to blame here as I was doing constant tests to try to get my speed rates up to my service rate.
(Maybe just a warning to others to take it easy on the demands of your creation.)

With my tests I was unable to reach close to my actual speeds. 120p/70d/30u
As this software is on the router I assumed it would use my main non VPN service.
I found out that was not the case as I had 2 vpn clients running with YazFi.
I turned both clients off and finally had actual download and ping speeds at actual speed.
The upload speed was better but still at 60Mbps. ???

Also what I have concluded is that 'spdmerlin' is not VPN friendly. I tried to get a distant preference
list in an area I use frequently but was unable to. I can only assume that the "speedtest-cli"
software may have this as a limit. I have tried to dedicate the whole router to a vpn server again with
no success. I am able to surf via browser or using an app to a vpn server to achieve this but not
with the router using spdmerlin. So I am stuck with only real local preferences. Can this be changed?

Also what is the option "6. Toggle single connection mode"?

Thanks again for your spectacular dedication and skills.

Marnik

2 VPN clients here and no issues - what do your policy rules look like?

speedtest-cli does not use file/io for testing only memory, so the usb failure is likely something else (cheap nand)

You can get a full list of servers using /jffs/scripts/spdcli.py --list

Single connection mode mirrors the new option on speedtest.net

 

[Marnik]

speedtest-cli does not use file/io for testing only memory, so the usb failure is likely something else (cheap nand)

Yes, very very cheap! (I am learning)

 

[matt_14012309]

Thanks for the script, download speeds track really well. Uploads are a bit funny, I was wondering if anyone might know why.
The uploads show with a unit of u on the main screen (see screenshot) my internet plan is 50/20 (standard australian fttn nbn) the speed test graphs sometimes show 40u up? if i run the tool from a terminal though it shows useually 0.4Mbit up. It should be more in the range of 10Mb to 15Mb though.
Also would anyone know if there is a config for the graphs somewhere that i can define the min/max Y axis to set values?

 

[L&LD]

@Marnik and @matt_14012309 and others I may have missed, regarding the upload speeds with spdMerlin.

The router hardware is much too weak (both CPU and RAM) to be able to give a reasonable attempt of matching uploads possible with a laptop or desktop computer.

I love the idea of spdMerlin, but reading through the thread here, my journey will clearly show that even an RT-AC68U or an RT-AC3100 (1.4GHz dual-core and 512MB of RAM) is barely enough for anything about 50Mbps upload speeds. The RT-AC86U (1.8GHz dual-core with 512MB of RAM) should be capable of more, but it will consistently crash whenever spdMerlin is run.

All tested routers below are configured from scratch with a proper M&M Config running RMerlin 384.10_2 and with a 2GB swap file in amtm using Ext4 with journalling enabled on a USB 3.0 drive used in USB 2.0 mode (GUI option).

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/s...eedtests-with-graphs.55904/page-9#post-478523

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/s...eedtests-with-graphs.55904/page-9#post-478552

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/s...eedtests-with-graphs.55904/page-9#post-479170

The last post above with a 1Gbps up/down connection fails completely.

The main differences between a computer run speedtest.net run and a spdMerlin run is the higher latency shown with spdMerlin and of course the weaker upload speeds, but also the lower download speeds depending on the ISP connection (cable vs. Fibre) and if the ISP offers anything greater than about 50Mbps up/down (symmetrical).

Looking forward when the hardware on our routers catches up to the great scripts Jack Yaz has on offer for us to use.

 

[Gitsum]

On my AX88U with a 1gig internet connection it is not working well either. Great idea though and probably works great with slower internet connections.

 

[L&LD]

On my AX88U with a 1gig internet connection it is not working well either. Great idea though and probably works great with slower internet connections.

And that is with a quad-core and 1GB of RAM.

Does using the script crash your beefy router though? Like it does with my much weaker RT-AC3100 and closer-to-yours RT-AC86U?

 

[matt_14012309]

Bugger! I would have thought my RT-AC88U would have been ok. I removed the -no-pre-allocate to see if it would (at the sake of ram) help but the upload speed was still reporting as .4Mb. I like the idea of this, I dont know enough about customising it (I had to google how to save in vi) but if you do develop it further, maybe support for the no upload switch and removing the upload graphs, perhaps a toggle, to enable each of ping, download,upload separately? Probably a lot of work with different page components though.
Anyway thanks for your contributions to the merlin community!

 

[Jack Yaz]

Bugger! I would have thought my RT-AC88U would have been ok. I removed the -no-pre-allocate to see if it would (at the sake of ram) help but the upload speed was still reporting as .4Mb. I like the idea of this, I dont know enough about customising it (I had to google how to save in vi) but if you do develop it further, maybe support for the no upload switch and removing the upload graphs, perhaps a toggle, to enable each of ping, download,upload separately? Probably a lot of work with different page components though.
Anyway thanks for your contributions to the merlin community!

This is something I've been considering doing, the upload test seems to be the killer on bigger pipes.

Toggle will be easy enough for the testing, but for webui graphs I'd probably need to be a bit clever with sed or something (who doesn't love a bit of string/file manipulation??)

 

[bluzfanmr1]

I've had the opposite experience with my RT-AC66U_B1 in that the uploads are matching but the downloads are showing 20% less speed when compared to my ISP speed and/or a browser based test. As said in this thread, I am chalking it up to the limitation of my router.

 

[gattaca]

Actually, that is exactly what should happen. Use all the RAM for the job on hand (if needed), swap everything else out to make the current task as fast as possible.

Of course, I'm assuming that your router will properly swap/release RAM as needed. Let's see.

Yes, Linux in general will take unused pRAM and use it for disk cache and other needs... I suspect similar may be happening in this linux distro...

 

[gattaca]

I've had the opposite experience with my RT-AC66U_B1 in that the uploads are matching but the downloads are showing 20% less speed when compared to my ISP speed and/or a browser based test. As said in this thread, I am chalking it up to the limitation of my router.

I'll look again tonight as this has been loaded and running a few days... This AM, I recall the DOWN/UP speeds were tracking closely to the subscriptions limits of 300/20.

I do not have a lot running on the AC86U outside of some (not all) of the amtm portal tooling - diversion standard, ad-blocking, pixelserv, skynet, and now ntp and spdMerlin. No VPNs and no extra wifi tooling.

VPNs are particularly hard on these pCPUs I think b/c of the encryption. I'm not sure if they have accelerated encryption capabilities like the Intel chipsets. Later.