Hi Folks,
anyone has tested the transferspeed on the WLan of a RB153 ? - it’s R52H board.
I am having it running - connection 54Mbit configured - from a linux system on the ethernet port - to WLan, I get a maximun of 1.2MiBytes transfer speed (or 9.6MBit).
Can anyone confirm this - or has it something to do with the WPA configured ?
Thx for any comments on this.
153 has a small CPU and WPA (like most secure encryptions are) is resource consuming. Disabling WPA may provide higher throughput, though you will have sacrificed some security (not suggested in hostile environments)
Yes - that was what I thought …
Anyway - I would also use openvpn - but I would have the same there then, right ?
Have to think about something else. Having some more boxes hanging around. meybe I’ll use these a VPN Concentrators, and disable encryption completely on WLan - though route only the outcome of the OpenVPN connection, and lock all the rest…
Wireless encryption are afaik done on the radio, not in the OS so it should not cause any performance issues when you use encryption.
/Henrik
This was an assumption I also had - until I realized that WPA is actually a software part on most Linux side systems - you can add on top of the wireless stack - so - in this specific case - as RouterOS is based on Linux IMHO - it will be handled by the CPU.
I’ll do some speed-tests without WPA - just to be sure later on 
no, wireless enctyption is done by the wireless card. so it doesn’t affect performance
OK. thx for the information.
In that case - I am wondering why I only get 1.2MBytes max transfer rate on a 54Mbit link.
I will monitor it a little when back home …
It may be the PCI Bus though - I don’t know if the MIPS CPU is able to handle the full bandwidth of the PCI Bus ?
What is connection quality (CCQ)? Could be interference or alignment issues. CPU shouldn’t bottleneck until you get over about 10 mb, in which case turning off connection tracking helps quite a bit (if you are not natting).
Eric
Hmmm. Could you emphasise on this ?
I am natting - also the WLan interface to pppoe only though.
I however did the transfer speed test from local LAN (Ether 5) to WLan Interface, where NAT is not configured on. Nat is only configure through pppoe Interface.
I have to admit though - that I have roughly 125 Firewall rules though many are not applied on the WLAN Interface, mostly on traffic into the forward chain coming out fro interface pppoe ..
Any more hints ?
Note that I do get 10.8MegaBit traffic on the Wlan Interface - makes roughly 1.2MBytes.
Is that what you mean ?
How can I monitor exactly the connection quality ? The WLan connection is excellent.
Have linked the RB153 to a Netgear DG834GTB I use in my Office.
I can confirm that the max interface speed the RB153 can handle through a WLan Interface is around 10.4Mbps or 1.3MBytes/s.
A test to check if the transmission strength is impacted upon high usage - can not be confirmed. I did a longer test by downloading some data from outside the Internet (e.g. data has to pass through pppoe interface and out to wlan - max 6MBit limited by ADSL speed) did not show anything unusual. The 10.4Mbps tests are cut out - as I have reconfigured my Monitoring system.
Check out for yourselves. You can see that the CPU Load goes high when traffic goes high. 100% is always reached when doing transfers at 10.4Mbps.
So yes - the amximum transfer speed of the RB153 is limited by the CPU.
Any chance to overclock the CPU ? Guess the RB5xx Series boards have the same CPU inside - it should be possible to do so - or am I wrong ?
