I have this simple hotspot with a 4mbps connection that I’m using for Hotspot. the maximum users are a16 connected devices at any point in time all the users are actually only surfing the internet. The highest consumption of bandwidth would be streaming of youtube videos which at any point I won’t have more than 3 people streaming during the day or not more than 6 during the evening.
But for about a couple of weeks now, I’ve noticed my internet tends to be really slow once i have more than 11 users connected. Initially i thought it was from my service provider but when i unplug the main connection from the system unit that is serving as the router and plug it to my laptop, everything works really, really fine.
I put it back into the router and things get messy again. This wasn’t the case when the network engineer came to set up the hotspot for us.
What could be wrong with my router? could it be the hardware(system unit) or the software (routeros)?
PS: This wasn’t the case when we started using it and this is an internet cafe where all the pcs having pci wireless card so the usage details I’m giving are accurate enough.
First of all, your OS version is rather out of date, that probably doesn’t have anything to do with this, but official support, if you chose to use it, will tell you to upgrade to the latest version.
You fail to mention a lot of information that would be helpful in tracking it down. Such as, what is the CPU load when you notice the slow down? How much bandwidth is passing through the box at time of slow down? Have you run torch on your WAN and LAN interfaces when the slow down happens to see what devices are passing traffic and what they are doing? Answer those questions first as it will probably tell you where to look, and provide the output of these things for starters if that doesn’t give you where to look along with the results of the above questions:
Honestly, I paid someone to come and set it up and he is even refusing to show up to address this problem that I am having. am not that knowleadgeable with routeros that much so i dont know how to interpret the output when i run the torch.
Typical bandwidth usage per user really is maximum of 50kbps/300kpbs (rx/tx rates) per user with about 16 users maximum. I don’t know where to check for the total bandwith from routeros and so i’m quoting what i see from the hotspot active users page.
I ran the above commands and these are what i got:
[admin@MikroTik] > ip firewall export
# nov/01/2012 13:57:47 by RouterOS 3.30
# software id = P3P1-ZADU
#
/ip firewall connection tracking
set enabled=yes generic-timeout=10m icmp-timeout=10s tcp-close-timeout=10s tcp-close-wait-timeout=10s \
tcp-established-timeout=1d tcp-fin-wait-timeout=10s tcp-last-ack-timeout=10s tcp-syn-received-timeout=5s \
tcp-syn-sent-timeout=5s tcp-syncookie=no tcp-time-wait-timeout=10s udp-stream-timeout=3m udp-timeout=10s
/ip firewall filter
add action=passthrough chain=unused-hs-chain comment="place hotspot rules here" disabled=yes
/ip firewall nat
add action=passthrough chain=unused-hs-chain comment="place hotspot rules here" disabled=yes
add action=masquerade chain=srcnat comment="masquerade hotspot network" disabled=no src-address=10.10.0.0/24
/ip firewall service-port
set ftp disabled=no ports=21
set tftp disabled=no ports=69
set irc disabled=no ports=6667
set h323 disabled=no
set sip disabled=no ports=5060,5061
set pptp disabled=no
[admin@MikroTik] >
/queue export
[admin@MikroTik] > queue export
# nov/01/2012 13:58:27 by RouterOS 3.30
# software id = P3P1-ZADU
#
/queue type
set default kind=pfifo name=default pfifo-limit=50
set ethernet-default kind=pfifo name=ethernet-default pfifo-limit=50
set wireless-default kind=sfq name=wireless-default sfq-allot=1514 sfq-perturb=5
set synchronous-default kind=red name=synchronous-default red-avg-packet=1000 red-burst=20 red-limit=60 \
red-max-threshold=50 red-min-threshold=10
set hotspot-default kind=sfq name=hotspot-default sfq-allot=1514 sfq-perturb=5
set default-small kind=pfifo name=default-small pfifo-limit=10
/queue interface
set ether1 queue=ethernet-default
set ether2 queue=ethernet-default
set ppp-out1 queue=default
set ppp-out2 queue=default
set ppp-out3 queue=default
set ppp-out4 queue=default
set ppp-out5 queue=default
set ppp-out6 queue=default
set ppp-out7 queue=default
set ppp-out8 queue=default
set ppp-out9 queue=default
set ppp-out10 queue=default
set ppp-out11 queue=default
set ppp-out12 queue=default
set ppp-out13 queue=default
set ppp-out14 queue=default
set ppp-out15 queue=default
[admin@MikroTik] >
I will be glad if you can figure out something for me.
One more thing is that : i have issued over 3,000 logins which are all listed in the hotspot user sections though they are used up. could it be consuming memory and being the cause?
In torch you are mainly looking for an unusual number of connections/packets coming from a single host. So you would order it by RX on the LAN or WAN and see if a single host is hammering the server. Sometimes in a hotspot a single guest can bring the system down and kill the CPU by making a ton of HTTP requests without ever signing in, since the hotspot has to proxy and process each request that takes a lot of CPU time. Here is a filter rule that might help with that a bit.
You can get the current CPU usage by going to system resources, or by right clicking on the top and telling it to add CPU to winbox.
The number of codes there might be an issue, but that would be more of a memory thing than CPU and speed. It would be wise to find a better way to manage your codes though. At the very least delete old ones that you don’t use any more, and you can look into a hosted RADIUS system to make your life easier in that regard.
when i ran torch, I realized that i was the same person consuming all the bandwidth since i had several simuntaneous connections open even though i was doing nothing.
so i disconnect my laptop and the network runs fine.
I also noticed that i had disabled the bandwidth limitations that I had applied and so enabled it limiting each user to 512kbps/512kpbs (rx/tx) now everything seems to run fine.
I really appreciate your assistance. thanks again.
