CPU Usage Experiment

[TheLyppardMan]

I decided to try the stock firmware on my RT-AC86U today, to see how the CPU/RAM usage compared with the Merlin firmware under similar conditions. To my surprise, the stock firmware has put a much higher load on one of the CPU cores. I need to leave it a little while longer to see what happens to the RAM usage.

Any idea why there is such a difference in the CPU load between the two firmwares? I did perform a full factory reset after loading the stock firmware and then reconfigured everything from scratch.

 

[RMerlin]

Run "top" and see what uses the CPU. That graph will give you zero information as to what is going on.

 

[TheLyppardMan]

I've put Merlin back on as I couldn't remember how to use the "top" thingy. I did have quite a bit of trouble getting it all up and running again though. First problem after installing Merlin fireware and performing a factory reset was that I couldn't log back in (it wouldn't accept my user name/password, so I tried Admin/admin, admin/admin etc, but none of those would work either). So I had to use the reset button on the back of the router, which then gave me the "create a new network" situation I was expecting to see. After I had successfully logged back in, everything seemed to be going OK until I stated assigning a few of my devices to static IP's. On the first attempt, the names and icons I was assigning kept changing back to "New device". Then after a reboot, I tried again and this time it seemed to work. That is, until the next reboot, when not only had all the static IP's disappeared, but all the other network-connected devices I had re-named had reverted back to their default names and icons. So what I expected to take about an hour or so took at least twice as long.

 

[RMerlin]

Simply make backups of your settings and the JFFS partition before switching firmware. I can switch between stock and Merlin in 10 minutes here.