Wifi Connection Speed

Micha3L · 2012-03-23 07:48:00

Hi everyone,

I had a thread in the newbie corner about filesharing, however I have now come across an even worse issue.

It's to do with my wifi speed. I am using netcfg to set up a connection automatically, however I have done the setup manually and it made no difference. The problem is the speed is pretty bad. I plan on using the machine as I download and local fileserver, so wireless speeds of max 100kb/s vs. my Windows' machines 800kb/s is not quite good enough.
I use the ath9k driver for my TP-Link card, and I have tried disabling power-saving and forcing a higher bitrate, but neither of those solutions work.

Can anyone assist?

uberscientist · 2012-03-23 22:35:20

Micha3L wrote:

Can anyone assist?

Have you tried looking at a packet capture from wireshark? That might help you figure out where the bottleneck is. If not feel free to upload a pcap file somewhere (and make sure there's no passwords in it!)

ewaller · 2012-03-23 23:00:21

Question: How did you establish that it is 100 kBits/second? Any chance you are mixing units and comparing 100 kBytes/sec to 800 kBits/sec ?

What is the output of iwconfig ?

Micha3L · 2012-03-24 03:18:22

ewaller wrote:

Question: How did you establish that it is 100 kBits/second? Any chance you are mixing units and comparing 100 kBytes/sec to 800 kBits/sec ?
What is the output of iwconfig ?

I meant 100 kilobytes per second. I got that from getting packages from mirrors, donwloading some torrents, and downloading Big Buck Bunny to test my filesharing. It never got much above 100, whereas on Windows I get 800+.

Output of iwconfig:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"wifinetwork"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 08:76:FF:46:D4:4C   
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=14 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=62/70  Signal level=-48 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:11346   Missed beacon:0

bangkok_manouel · 2012-03-24 03:31:11

which protocol are you using? even 800k/sec sucks /edit: for local file sharing I mean

Last edited by bangkok_manouel (2012-03-24 03:35:11)

ewaller · 2012-03-24 03:51:20

Well, the speed to your router should be 54 Mbit / sec. Have you another computer on your private network against which you can benchmark?
I think your real problem is the download link over your Internet connection. I'm not sure about the difference from Windows, but lets verify the LAN speed first.

Also, are you on DSL, Cable Modem, fiber, other?

Micha3L · 2012-03-25 01:36:09

I live in a new-ish estate so the Internet infrastructure is rather poor. The 800 kilobytes/second is most likely the max of my (I assume, thats what my ISP says) ADSL2 connection. It is the difference between my Windows and Linux machines that is bothering me most. 100 on Linux, and then 800 on Windows is pretty poor. I am benchmarking against that Windows machine.

I assume I am on IPv6, as I havent forcibly changed it to IPv4.

mikioma · 2012-03-26 07:03:15

I'm having a similar problem... don't know if it's the same, but it looks like.

Wi-fi speed was very good up until I upgraded something (my first guess is the kernel itself). Since then I get 100Mb/s... eventually it reaches 1000Mb/s (its top) for a couple of minutes, but then again it drops to 100Mb/s.

I'll try to downgrade kernel during the day. If that works, I'll post a bug report.

Currently running Kernel 3.2.12

Arch Linux

#1 2012-03-23 07:48:00

Wifi Connection Speed

#2 2012-03-23 22:35:20

Re: Wifi Connection Speed

#3 2012-03-23 23:00:21

Re: Wifi Connection Speed

#4 2012-03-24 03:18:22

Re: Wifi Connection Speed

#5 2012-03-24 03:31:11

Re: Wifi Connection Speed

#6 2012-03-24 03:51:20

Re: Wifi Connection Speed

#7 2012-03-25 01:36:09

Re: Wifi Connection Speed

#8 2012-03-26 07:03:15

Re: Wifi Connection Speed

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