Why is ASUS disinterested in fixing RT-AX89X going out of memory causing a reboot?

[Matt King]

2/18/2024



Why is ASUS disinterested in fixing RT-AX89X going out of memory causing a reboot?

I have been very disappointed with the performance of the ASUS RT-AX89X router. I have been experiencing this problem even when my router was under warranty. My repeated complaints to ASUS support were limited to calls for the system log and firmware update even when mine was up to date. This begs the question of why ASUS is disinterested in fixing this memory crash, especially after recognizing this issue with the ASUS Security Daemon (ASD) service overloading the router.



I am disappointed by the nonchalant attitude of ASUS Support who have downplayed the connectivity cut-off that is all over the internet. This problem has something to do with memory leaks that seem to suggest manufacturer defects to me. To pretend that they never heard about this problem is disingenuous and deceitful. It is all over the internet.



The Syslog I sent earlier to ASUS support covers December 14th, 2023 to January 5th, 2024. Asking for more Syslog without any feedback on the previous ones appears to be the chink in Asus’ armour.

 

[glens]

I'll speculate on this. Asus primarily uses Broadcom hardware, though they've also got some (lower-end?) devices running on MediaTek. Qualcomm is rather a novelty for them, isn't it?

Okay, with that "understanding" I'd guess they defer as much stuff to their hardware providers as possible. Problem with 2.4 and 5 GHz clients communicating? Hey, Broadcom, what do you see wrong here? Maybe something else. Hey, MediaTek, can you take a look at this?

Depending on how much business they're getting from Asus I'd think the supplier would be more or less willing to lend a hand. If Qualcomm is less-than-responsive because Asus doesn't give them much income, it may be a factor in continuing issues.

I'm not suggesting this is in fact what's going on, merely that it's a possibility.

Also possible is Asus is just too busy at the moment bringing next-generation stuff to market to be able to devote the necessary time for fixing something they plan on letting fall by the wayside before long anyway. Again, merely speculation

 

[TheLostSwede]

Having worked at a router manufacturer I can only agree with the above post.
We found an issue with the MTK hardware we used in one model and it took six months to get a fix for it from MTK.
As such, it's most likely not disinterest from Asus' side, but rather, it takes forever to get fixes from the hardware manufacturers.

 

[dcs0r]

How old is your router? Can you do anything under warranty?

 

[OzarkEdge]

2/18/2024



Why is ASUS disinterested in fixing RT-AX89X going out of memory causing a reboot?

I have been very disappointed with the performance of the ASUS RT-AX89X router. I have been experiencing this problem even when my router was under warranty. My repeated complaints to ASUS support were limited to calls for the system log and firmware update even when mine was up to date. This begs the question of why ASUS is disinterested in fixing this memory crash, especially after recognizing this issue with the ASUS Security Daemon (ASD) service overloading the router.



I am disappointed by the nonchalant attitude of ASUS Support who have downplayed the connectivity cut-off that is all over the internet. This problem has something to do with memory leaks that seem to suggest manufacturer defects to me. To pretend that they never heard about this problem is disingenuous and deceitful. It is all over the internet.



The Syslog I sent earlier to ASUS support covers December 14th, 2023 to January 5th, 2024. Asking for more Syslog without any feedback on the previous ones appears to be the chink in Asus’ armour.

A router that reboots is not usable here... I would have returned it and got my money back.

OE

 

[PureSpeed]

This is a well known issue with this model there have been a few different tricks to fix the issue temporarily. One was a complete hard reset another was if IPv6 is enabled disable it. Another was to ssh into the router and enter a command. I forget what the command was but I believe it’s on the official Asus forums

 

[sfx2000]

Depending on how much business they're getting from Asus I'd think the supplier would be more or less willing to lend a hand. If Qualcomm is less-than-responsive because Asus doesn't give them much income, it may be a factor in continuing issues.

How can any chipset vendor be responsible for code that was written by Asus?

ASD is Asus, not chipset...

 

[sfx2000]

Also possible is Asus is just too busy at the moment bringing next-generation stuff to market to be able to devote the necessary time for fixing something they plan on letting fall by the wayside before long anyway. Again, merely speculation

This holds true for most vendors - development on new product is well funded, and you get the best/brightest devs onboard...

Sustaining/Maint work - it's basically overhead on the product, so it doesn't get the funding or staffing to keep active devs engaged on an ongoing basis... you'll get the periodic maint/security releases on an as-needed basis...

 

[RMerlin]

Until someone can point at an actual program that is allocating and never freeing memory, or a specific piece of code that can reproducibly cause a memory drain, this remains anecdotal. The fact that memory usage increases over time only indicates that... memory usage is increasing. That could be from a logfile stored in tmpfs that's increasing in size. That could be from buffers and cache usage increasing as file I/O is occurring and data is being cached. A lot of perfectly normal events can lead to an increase in memory usage over time.

A lot of the "memory leaks" reports on online forums are from people who see the memory usage increase, and immediately conclude that it must be memory leaks. It's not, unless these have done any actual investigation to point at the actual source of these leaks.

Having water on your floor does not always mean a pipe is leaking. Might just be the cat that came back from playing outside after it rained.

 

[sfx2000]

A lot of the "memory leaks" reports on online forums are from people who see the memory usage increase, and immediately conclude that it must be memory leaks. It's not, unless these have done any actual investigation to point at the actual source of these leaks.

Agreed...

Having water on your floor does not always mean a pipe is leaking. Might just be the cat that came back from playing outside after it rained.

Maybe KItty wants the litter box cleaned - just kidding, but you kind of set that one up...

 

[glens]

How can any chipset vendor be responsible for code that was written by Asus?

ASD is Asus, not chipset...

Obviously such a case would be excluded from consideration in reference to what I'd said. I was speaking in generalities and you introduced something specific, which may in fact be the/an underlying issue, but at this point that's /also/ speculation.

 

[sfx2000]

Obviously such a case would be excluded from consideration in reference to what I'd said. I was speaking in generalities and you introduced something specific, which may in fact be the/an underlying issue, but at this point that's /also/ speculation.

OP brought up that the concern was ASD - Broadcom or other SoC vendors can't help there, unfortunately.

 

[glens]

Guess I missed that part.

 

[Gribnik]

I’ll tell you 100% sure that there are no problems with insufficient memory on the Opewwrt firmware, but there are a lot of other problems......

 

[aaronwt]

2/18/2024



Why is ASUS disinterested in fixing RT-AX89X going out of memory causing a reboot?

I have been very disappointed with the performance of the ASUS RT-AX89X router. I have been experiencing this problem even when my router was under warranty. My repeated complaints to ASUS support were limited to calls for the system log and firmware update even when mine was up to date. This begs the question of why ASUS is disinterested in fixing this memory crash, especially after recognizing this issue with the ASUS Security Daemon (ASD) service overloading the router.



I am disappointed by the nonchalant attitude of ASUS Support who have downplayed the connectivity cut-off that is all over the internet. This problem has something to do with memory leaks that seem to suggest manufacturer defects to me. To pretend that they never heard about this problem is disingenuous and deceitful. It is all over the internet.



The Syslog I sent earlier to ASUS support covers December 14th, 2023 to January 5th, 2024. Asking for more Syslog without any feedback on the previous ones appears to be the chink in Asus’ armour.

How often does this happen? I've been using my RT-AX89X for around 1.4 years now, using the stock firmware. And I have not run across any memory or reboot issues. I am using mine with over 130 devices, on my home network.

 

[Brad H]

I had this same issue. Took me weeks to find a solution. Disable AiProtection. I haven't had a unexplained reboot since (2 years).

 

[Gustour]

no reboot here. uptime over 90days.

 

[Codename_Falcon]

Mine drops the Wi-Fi connections regularly, but never reboots on it's own.