Traffic Analyzer - undershooting real totals

[archm]

I enabled the Traffic Analyzer feature a couple of days ago and noticed that most of the time it shows about 10-40MB per hour and about 450MB daily. This seemed really low, so I downloaded a couple off GBs of files and the total for that hour shows only about 60MB. I'm not finding any discussions about the data being inaccurate on the forums so I'm wondering if anyone has ideas on how to proceed.

Router: RT-AX68U
Stock firmware version: 3.0.0.4.386_46055

 

[ColinTaylor]

This has been discussed for years. The hardware acceleration that Asus routers use to achieve gigabit throughput bypasses the normal network stack. So, depending on which reports you're looking at and how your router is configured traffic volume can be massively under-reported.

 

[archm]

This has been discussed for years. The hardware acceleration that Asus routers use to achieve gigabit throughput bypasses the normal network stack. So, depending on which reports you're looking at and how your router is configured traffic volume can be massively under-reported.

Thank you, that makes sense. I did find one related discussion from a couple of years ago saying that someone's bandwidth was likely being throttled because the CPU was getting pinned doing traffic analysis, but I'm not sure I saw any associated configuration.

Just to clarify, would this logic be kicking on a 300-350Mbit ISP link / would the CPU get pinned at such a rate? The report I'm specifically interested is the one below. Is there a specific config I can look at or experiment with? I'm not sure I've seen anything related in the stock firmware, and I can't seem to come up with the right search terms to find related discussions.

 

[ColinTaylor]

The CPU restricting the WAN to LAN throughput was consequence of hardware acceleration being disabled, particularly on the older models like the RT-AC68U. By enabling hardware acceleration the throughput restriction went away but a side effect was that the traffic statistics were under-reported.

The newer models (like the RT-AX86U) use a different method of acceleration and have more powerful CPUs so don't suffer from this problem as much, if at all. I don't know where your RT-AX68U fits into this (because I don't have one). It sounds very similar to the old under-reporting issue but perhaps it's something different. I would expect the Traffic Analyzer > Statistic page to be correct even if Traffic Analyzer >Traffic Monitor wasn't.