Thread: Poor wifi performance?
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Milhouse is offline Milhouse
2007-12-09 , 17:29
Posts: 3,401 | Thanked: 1,255 times | Joined on Nov 2005 @ London, UK
#18
Originally Posted by Serge View Post
Theoretically wlan chip should never go to sleep if you are pumping a lot of data through it and trying to get maximum bandwidth. Anyway, overall wlan bandwidth is not very good. IMHO it is mostly caused by inefficient code in wlan driver which causes it to eat all the cpu resources on heavy wlan transfers. That's especially bad for media streaming, as video player has less cpu resources left on decoding. The higher is video bitrate, the more cycles get eaten by wlan driver thus starving the decoder. This looks like a purely software problem and hopefully it can be fixed later.
Remember how Flash would (and still does) stutter while a Flash video is downloading, yet it plays fine once the download is complete? I wonder if this is due to the download over WiFi unecessarily sapping CPU cycles - I realise that some CPU cycles will be needed to download the Flash data, but I was surprised to see that enough cycles were taken to screw up Flash playback.

As a test I just disabled PSM on my N800/OS2008 (Linksys WRT54GS access point Beacon/DTIM set to 100ms/1ms respectively) and it seems (it's hard to quantify this scientifically) that browsing is faster with PSM disabled - pages seemed to download their resources much more quickly, the progress bar displaying "139/142" (or whatever) seemed to churn through each resource with much less delay. Anyone able to confirm this? My battery just died on me!

Any improvements to WiFi performance would be greatly appreciated - I feel that there is some "fat" in the WiFi stack which could be trimmed to the benefit of us all.
Last edited by Milhouse; 2007-12-09 at 17:34.