AC68 net slowness with .58 and .57 when USB flash drive is attached

[geonjay]

Hello. I have 1Gbps internet service. Using my providers speed test I can usually putll ~940Mbps down and push ~910Mbps up. There was a slight slow down when I installed .57 and, now on .58, I'm stuck with exactly 300Mbps down and 740Mbps up...test after test. If I plug my workstation directly into the fiber terminator (bypassing the ac68) I'm back to ~940/~910Mbps, testing again through the router puts me back to 300/740. I was searching the forums last night looking for an answer and was REALLY hesitant to nuke everything and start over. I did a full soft reboot...I pulled the plug...nothing. Finally I decided to pull the power and remove the USB...upon reboot i was able to get ~940/910 through the router again!!!! Without rebooting I plugged the USB key back in and retested - back to 300Mbps. Unmounted and pulled the USB out, without rebooting, and my speed was up again.

I've been using the same USB key since I've had the device. I don't have IPTraf or any other kind of traffic monitoring/logging going on. I have NAT acceleration set to Auto, and the Sysinfo page indicates that it is enabled. No VPNs are configured, no IPv6, no packets are being logged. I don't have any of the QoS setting enabled. I did notice that under .58 my syslog is now filled with these messages, but they were not present in .57
Apr 15 08:39:04 kernel: TCP: time wait bucket table overflow
Apr 15 08:39:08 kernel: net_ratelimit: 577 callbacks suppressed
Apr 15 08:39:08 kernel: TCP: time wait bucket table overflow


I ran top while doing some speed test and NNTP pulls - I see an kernel interrupt eating a lot of CPU - but that doesn't change when I remove the USB drive. The only app have I set to run on the USB is Asterisk. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[geonjay]

Ok..I finally broke down and did a 30-30-30 reset after backing everything up...loaded 380.58 from the emergency firmware loader AND cleared the NVRAM. Rebooted and waited 5 mins. Went through the setup wizard, left the default SSID and admin username. Ran the speed test and I'm back to ~800/~900. Ran it several times, grabbed a torrent, and an NZB - they all flew! Then I plugged the USB drive back into the USB3.0 port and waited a few minutes. Speed test was good. I restored my /jffs, enabled jffs scripts, and rebooted. It came up and was slow again. I unmounted the USB but didn't actually remove it from the port - speed test was still slow. I pulled the USB out - still slow. Left the USB out and rebooted - speed test was good again! I disabled /JFFS scripts and removed the init.d scripts from /jffs and pulled the power on the router. inserted usb key and plugged the router back in. After it was fully up I ran the test - we were good! I decided to only turn the swap on and let the system run - speed test was good. I left the house for a few hours, came home - speed test was slow again. I used the nvram-backup tool to backup the NVRAM and /jffs. I restored defaults via the GUI, pulled the plug, and took out the USB key. I rebooted it, after about 5 mins I ran the test - it was good. I did a "clean" restore of nvram using the nvram-restore utility and rebooted. Upon reboot everything seemed to be ok and the speed test was good. I wake up this morning and speed is back down. So I've just done a "restore defaults", rebooted, and let it sit. The speed test was good. I changed my SSID's and passwords so everything has access again. Speed test is still good. I'm just going to leave it for a few hours and see if it's stable. I may just have some weird setting in NVRAM that is persistent and bad. If I see the speed loss again I may start looking at the wires.

Things I've noticed -
1) when the speed tests are good and I have the main router dashboard open (Network Map) I can see that both cores seem to be getting equally taxed. When it's slow it's clear that core 1 is taking almost all of the load. (that's what she said)
2) Until I loaded .58 I never saw my swap file being used - the "free" command always reported 0 use. Now, if swap is enabled, there's always a small bit of it being used.

 

[L&LD]

geonjay, just note that a '30-30-30' reset doesn't do anything on an Asus router.

That is an DDWRTism (as RMerlin has stated).

 

[geonjay]

Good point. It did get me to the emergency firmware loader...at least one of the 30-30-30 steps match up with the steps needed to get into that subsystem

 

[geonjay]

The speed has remained very fast. I decided to reload entware instead of just using what I already had. I see that entware now installs to a new dir (entware instead of entware.arm). I reinstalled a few utilities and Asterisk. I have Asterisk configured and I've had a few calls already - and the speed is still up. My next move will be to enable swap again and see if the speed changes. The only NVRAM settings I've loaded are my static DHCP list.