WAN LAN throughput conundrum

[unmesh]

Hi,

The hardware is a wireless router but the conundrum is around wired WAN <-> LAN performance hence I'm posting it here.

The Netgear R6300v2 was flashed with Tomato firmware and I had benchmarked it's NAT routing performance at around 800Mbps using iperf3 over Gigabit interfaces before deploying it as a gateway router with a measly 50/5 plan from Comcast/Xfinity. That benchmark is in the ballpark of what an old router chart on SNB shows.

This weekend, I updated it to a 600/15 plan and noticed that wired Gigabit devices on the LAN are only seeing sub-300Mbps download speeds when pointed to speedtest.xfinity.com whereas I do see 600 when connected directly to the modem.

Is iperf3 not representative of whatever these browser based speed tests do? Anything else to try before investing in a router with a faster SOC?

Thaks

 

[degrub]

Were you running the iperf tests between two devices connected to lan ports on the router or one on the wan interface and one on the lan interface ?

For the difference between the internet speed test, direct to the modem versus through the router, what, besides NAT / DHCP is running in the router ?

 

[unmesh]

WAN and LAN ports

Only NAT and DHCP that I am aware of. Even if there was something else, it is the same in the test setup and when actually connected to the Internet.

 

[degrub]

Did you run the tests with the current Netgear firmware ? What was the result ?
Did you run the tests with the wireless radios disabled ? result ?

Since your direct connect to the modem test was much higher than through the router, you might ask Netgear what the maximum up/down throughput you should expect from the device. i could not find the spec on their support pages.

 

[unmesh]

Wired throughput is rarely specified by the vendor but I will try it with the radios disabled

 

[unmesh]

Since I don't use any feature compromised by CTF, I turned it on and am now getting the full throughput against the test website! Should probably look for a router with a faster CPU though.

 

[degrub]

not familiar with "CTF" ?

 

[unmesh]

Cut Through Forwarding which seems to be some sort of hardware accelerated pathway