Netgear WNDR3700v4 bandwidth loss with v1.13.0

[fred38]

Hello,

I've been using Gargoyle v1.12.0 (then v1.12.X pulled from gargoyle{dot}romanhk{dot}cz/1.12.x/) on a WNDR3700v4 router since early 2020, with great success. In fact, I moved to Gargoyle because of Covid-19: Myself and my wife working from home + 2 teenagers spending their time with online gaming, our life became a continuous fight for DSL bandwidth... Gargoyle QoS & graphical bandwidth monitoring brought peace back in our home Here, I truly want to thank all contributors for this great firmware !

Since then, we subscribed to a 300Mbit/s fibre connection. Although we do not necessarily need QoS anymore, I did not want to loose all other nice Gargoyle features and I've kept using 1.12.X. Indeed, with my old WNDR3700v4, bandwidth is limited to ~150Mbit/s which is enough vs. most of our needs.

With the objective to benefit of latest security improvements + with the intend to move from openVPN to wireguard, I tried to flash the latest 1.13.0 release. Unfortunately, I faced a ~50% bandwidth reduction (with out of the box default settings, no QoS enabled, no VPN server running. Just a simple IPv4 Gateway configuration). Such a bandwidth loss forced me to go back to 1.12.X.
=> Is it an expected/known slowdown with this old hardware ? Or would you suggest investigating a bit more ?

Thanks again for this great piece of software !

[Lantis]

I wouldn't expect a 50% decrease between those versions, but a small decrease yes. I have a wndr3800 i can do back to back testing on which is of a similar vintage.

[fred38]

Thanks for proposing this crosscheck. That would certainly be a very valuable reference datapoint.

[Lantis]

I’ll try to check this weekend

[Lantis]

I tested default settings, left IPv6 off (not available in 1.12), changed LAN range to avoid conflicts, no other changes.

1.12
Run 1 174mbps
Run 2 186mbps
Run 3 182mbps
Avg 181mbps

1.13
Run 1 131mbps
Run 2 130mbps
Run 3 122mbps
Avg 128mbps

1.15
Run 1 103mbps
Run 2 115mbps
Run 3 116mbps
Avg 111mbps

So yes there has been some reduction in throughput. I wouldn't necessarily expect 50% drop (as per numbers above) but it depends what else you're asking the router to do.
These older processors have a hard time keeping up with their day to day tasks, let alone routing as fast as possible.

For the older routers as well, try not using WPA3 (if you are) as the hardware doesn't support it so it moves all the cryptographic operations onto the CPU instead. Talk about a CPU hernia.

[fred38]

Thanks a lot for those figures. Although they do not fully confirm the 50% slow-down I observed, they clearly show that I should consider an upgrade to some more recent hardware !

By the way, from your past experience, do you believe that the SoC difference could explain a higher bandwidth impact of 1.12 -> 1.13 migration on wndr3700v4 (-50%) than on wndr3800 (-30%) ?
- wndr3700v4: AR9344 SoC with MIPS 74Kc CPU at 560MHz
- wndr3800: AR7161 SoC with MIPS 24Kc CPU at 680MHz
I would have expected a similar bias (if any) across all gargoyle releases, right ?

[Lantis]

Yes i'd expect a somewhat proportional difference due to the slightly slower CPU, but i'm not that familiar with the different mips architectures to know if there would be some gain in either direction.