Very poor performance on my R1 and UI not responding

[CrophiXx]

Hi there!

I'm becoming more and more desperate about my R1. A couple of days ago I got my new 1Gb/50Mb Cable connection and I have set up everything correctly. I put my router (that one from my ISP) in so called "Bridge Mode" to make it act just like a Modem. If I connect my Computer directly to the router I get speedtest results betwen 800-1000Mbps DOWN and between 45-50Mbps UP. Everything fine until here. When I connect the R1 to the router and my computer to the R1, my speedtest results drop dramatically. (See screenshots).

Trying to connect the cables to different ports on the R1 didn't fix the problem.
Factory Resetting/Rebooting the R1 didn't help either.
Disabling QoS completely helps a bit but still the speeds are horribly off from what they should be.
Replacing the cable between router and R1 also doesn't help. (Using a 1 Meter short Cat 6 cable here)
Trying various settings in the R1 didn't help. IPv6 on/off, different QoS features on/off, VPN is OFF)

About the next case:

After a couple of days of uptime, it seems that the webserver running on the R1 stops working. It's hard to tell WHEN this happens exactly because the R1 keeps working (you can dis-/reconnect to the WiFi and WAN and LAN are fine) but i can't connect to the WebUI and I can't reproduce this issue. The Browsers (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) just load entirelessly until the Browser just says there was no response. I have to re-power the R1 to make it reboot and work again.

 

Screenshots were made with Factory settings @Firmware R1 2.1.3.29 & during the tests only my computer was connected to the network.

[BIG__DOG]

Are you on dumaOS or the original firmware? as there's 2 settings on the R1 which are pre-emptive and reactive you can select to gain more speed depending on your connection type. I do know however that the R1 cannot handle gigabit speeds as it's hardware is not up-to-date. If you are on dumaOS it has DPP running as default with no way to disable it which slows down connections.

[CrophiXx]

1 hour ago, BIG__DOG said:

Are you on dumaOS or the original firmware? as there's 2 settings on the R1 which are pre-emptive and reactive you can select to gain more speed depending on your connection type. I do know however that the R1 cannot handle gigabit speeds as it's hardware is not up-to-date. If you are on dumaOS it has DPP running as default with no way to disable it which slows down connections.

I'm on Firmware Version 2.1.3.29 / DumaOS Version 1.3.29

What I am curious about is that I had a 400Mbps connection before and the R1 could handle it very well. Also the R1 is a GbE capable device, so it should be able to easily handle gigabit data transfer speeds. Even if the R1 could just handle 1000Mbps shared over all 5 LAN-Ports the speedtest results shouldn't be THIS bad, because my computer and the router were the only devices connected to the R1.

I'd like to try to re-flash the most recent firmware, because that is something I haven't tried yet just because I don't have the FW file anymore.
Reason for me to try that is, that the QoS never worked for me. Earlier I just had turned off the QoS because it slowed down my 400Mbps connection, no matter what settings I used, I had to completely turn it off to make full use of my connection, even when there was no priority traffic or if I set the sliders to 100%, nothing. Only option was turning it off.
Thats why I think there is something wrong with the SW on my R1.

[Netduma Alex]

DumaOS is more taxing on the R1 hardware than the original R1 firmware. This can mean that, with QoS enabled, you sometimes get sub optimal speeds. This is one reason that DumaOS on the R1 is considered a beta.

To figure out if it's a hardware limitation, you could take a look at the System Information screen of DumaOS. On there, you'll see a total usage percentage for CPU. If it's constantly at 100%, it would suggest that it's hit it's limit.

QoS is known to decrease your maximum speeds in some cases, but it's intended to be used on slower connections. If you think about it, the people who would benefit most from QoS are those with less bandwidth. The processing overhead of QoS can decrease bandwidth on the fastest connections, but often it turns out they wouldn't have needed it much anyway.

Also, sometimes aging hardware can cause slowdown like this. The R1 is quite a few years old now so it's possible that you ordered yours a long time ago and this is just the effect of aging.

It might be worth experimenting by downgrading your R1 to the latest version of the original firmware, and see if your speeds improve. 

[CrophiXx]

27 minutes ago, Netduma Alex said:

DumaOS is more taxing on the R1 hardware than the original R1 firmware. This can mean that, with QoS enabled, you sometimes get sub optimal speeds. This is one reason that DumaOS on the R1 is considered a beta.

To figure out if it's a hardware limitation, you could take a look at the System Information screen of DumaOS. On there, you'll see a total usage percentage for CPU. If it's constantly at 100%, it would suggest that it's hit it's limit.

QoS is known to decrease your maximum speeds in some cases, but it's intended to be used on slower connections. If you think about it, the people who would benefit most from QoS are those with less bandwidth. The processing overhead of QoS can decrease bandwidth on the fastest connections, but often it turns out they wouldn't have needed it much anyway.

Also, sometimes aging hardware can cause slowdown like this. The R1 is quite a few years old now so it's possible that you ordered yours a long time ago and this is just the effect of aging.

It might be worth experimenting by downgrading your R1 to the latest version of the original firmware, and see if your speeds improve. 

Thanks for the detailed answer!

The R1 doesn't even hit 50% usage when I'm doing a speedtest. The result from that short test was:
DOWNLOAD Mbps 187.23
UPLOAD Mbps 35.94

I'm aware that QoS slows down the connection a little bit and that I pratically don't need it but my point is that there is something generally wrong with the QoS on my R1 because it just slows down everything, no matter what settings I use. QoS being kept off in my R1 but something there is just not working as it should.

I bought my piece of hardware around 12-14 Months ago so the aging shouldn't hit so hard. I mean we're talking about 600-800Mbps loss of transfer speed.

I'll try it with downgrading and will come back after some testing 

[Netduma Fraser]

Let us know how downgrading works. I assume you're not using PPPoE or VLAN?

[CrophiXx]

So here I am back with the same results as on the other firmware.

Enabling Super Speed Mode / disabling Congestion control makes the speedtest ramp up to ~370-390Mbps at first but then steadily falls off to ~150-190Mbps.
Everything else gives me the same results as with the beta firmware.

Whats really bugging me the most is, that the upload speed doesn't even reach 50Mbps. I'm losing 15Mbps here. This can't be an hardware/performance issue.
 

@Netduma Fraser Exactly, I am not using either of them.

[Netduma Fraser]

Do you have another router potentially that you could put in between the modem and the R1 and then test on the R1 again? Could be there is some weird compatibility issue with the modem.

[CrophiXx]

On 9/26/2019 at 9:25 PM, Netduma Fraser said:

Do you have another router potentially that you could put in between the modem and the R1 and then test on the R1 again? Could be there is some weird compatibility issue with the modem.

Hi there and sorry for the very late answer!

Took me a little while to get my hands on another Router and test everything out. I was able to get a D-Link DIR-615 to put between the Netduma and the Cable Modem.
Lastly the results were exactly the same. It seems that the R1 hardware really isn't capable to achieve a throughput of 1Gbps.

[Netduma Alex]

Yeah that doesn't surprise me...

[Netduma Fraser]

It's definitely not capable of gigabit but I would have thought it would get higher results than this. It could simply be the age of the router, how long have you had it for?

[CrophiXx]

3 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

It's definitely not capable of gigabit but I would have thought it would get higher results than this. It could simply be the age of the router, how long have you had it for?

I bought it last year, around 12-14 months ago. I'd also have expected better results than this.

Well, seems to be time for an upgrade. 

[Netduma Fraser]

Just an idea but could you forward ALL ports to the PC you're speed testing with please and see if that helps. Also re-enable QoS but put Anti-Bufferbloat to never and then reset Bandwidth Allocation and try again - sometimes this helps. If that doesn't work then disable Traffic Prioritization and make a rule to prioritize ALL ports to that same PC and try again please.

[CrophiXx]

On 10/10/2019 at 11:14 PM, Netduma Fraser said:

Just an idea but could you forward ALL ports to the PC you're speed testing with please and see if that helps. Also re-enable QoS but put Anti-Bufferbloat to never and then reset Bandwidth Allocation and try again - sometimes this helps. If that doesn't work then disable Traffic Prioritization and make a rule to prioritize ALL ports to that same PC and try again please.

 

Sorry, for the late answer again. I gave that a try but that didn't help.

Eventually I just accepted the poor speeds. It's just the playstation that i really need connected to it, taking that little bit longer for downloading games or updates won't kill me and the Geo Filter is too good to just stash the Router and to make it a good memory. 

[Netduma Alex]

2 hours ago, CrophiXx said:

Sorry, for the late answer again. I gave that a try but that didn't help.

Eventually I just accepted the poor speeds. It's just the playstation that i really need connected to it, taking that little bit longer for downloading games or updates won't kill me and the Geo Filter is too good to just stash the Router and to make it a good memory. 

Well we've got a massive new update coming which will add loads of new features. The R1 is going to become more useful than ever.