N810 wifi maximum data rate
 

Hi,

I want to know the maximum effective throughput that we can get
with NS810 wifi. I have been running some experiments which show that the maximum effective throughput is not more than around 4-5 Mbps. Note that the network is not the bottleneck in these cases as with a laptop I can get throughput of around 20 Mbps. In both cases I am using 802.11g.

Can someone confirm this? If this is true then essentially 802.11g which offers effective throughput of around 30Mbps is pretty much useless for N810. Also, if this is true can someone point out the reason for this. Is the system bus becoming a bottleneck or the processor or something else?

thanks in advance,
fahad

Re: N810 wifi maximum data rate
 

That's about what I get, too. The LoadApplet status bar icon showed CPU usage was fairly high, so I'm guessing CPU is a bottleneck.

Strangely, I could scp a file to the n810 faster than I could transfer it just using netcat! I would have guessed the other way around. Scp has encryption overhead, netcat doesn't. Scp might be compressing the data, but since the file was already gzipped that shouldn't make a noticeable difference. Lastly, netcat was directing the file to /dev/null while scp was writing it to flash. All of this tells me that netcat is being much less efficient than sshd (from the openssh package). Very surprising.

File: 47 MByte gzipped CDROM ISO image.
scp: 103 seconds, for ~450 MBytes/sec (~3.6 Mbits/sec)
netcat: 170 seconds, for ~275 MBytes/sec (~2.2 Mbits/sec)

Repeated trials gave the same result, as did directing the output of netcat to a file rather than /dev/null.

So it's not just you. The poor little thing just can't suck bytes at 802.11g speeds. About the only benefit of having an 802.11g adapter is that it won't impact other 802.11g devices on the same network. An 802.11b device on an 802.11g access point may cause all the 802.11g clients to run slower.