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802.11AC router performance with new rMBP

C

citivolus

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 19, 2008
1,237
288
Just picked up an Asus AC66U router to go with my new rMBP. I'm sharing files between it and my iMac and am disappointed with the wifi performance. I have the iMac running to the router via cat6 and the rMBP connects to the router via wifi. I confirmed the wifi connection is established at a PHY of 1000 Mbps. Copying a 3GB file from the iMac to the rMBP shows at 45 MB/s from an AFP share on the iMac to the ssd of the rMBP. However, copying that same file back to the iMac AFP share takes 4 times longer at fits and stops of about 8 MB/s. I tried replacing the router and many different versions of firmware. The rMBP is apple refurbished but only two days old with no software installed. I tried resetting the pram and reinstalled osx to no avail.

Any suggestions? If you have this router, please post your setup and performance so I have something to compare against.

Thanks!
 
TheIguana said:
What happens when you plugin? Wireless is always going to suck contrast to a wired connection...
Click to expand...

When I use a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter, I get about 100 MB/s performance. What's weird is the significant asynchronous wifi performance. Receiving via wifi on the rMBP is four times faster than sending from the rMBP.

Anyone with this combo that can post their results?
 
citivolus said:
When I use a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter, I get about 100 MB/s performance.
Click to expand...
Apple makes two USB ethernet adapters, one is 100mbs, the other GigE. Make sure you have the latter.

NM: if it's Thunderbolt, it has to be GigE. Sorry.
 
citivolus said:
When I use a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter, I get about 100 MB/s performance. What's weird is the significant asynchronous wifi performance. Receiving via wifi on the rMBP is four times faster than sending from the rMBP.

Anyone with this combo that can post their results?
Click to expand...

Upgrade to Netgear R7000 or ASUS AC68U and your WiFi speed should improve dramatically. AC66U's CPU is the bottleneck.
 
cbautis2 said:
Upgrade to Netgear R7000 or ASUS AC68U and your WiFi speed should improve dramatically. AC66U's CPU is the bottleneck.
Click to expand...

In 802.11ac wireless performance on the AC66U and AC68U are the same.

lGShTmv.png
IFFZIzT.png


Dunno where you got your information from, the CPU load on my AC66U never even goes above 0.01% even when doing huge transfers from WiFi to Ethernet.
 
It's more to it then CPU. It's also the pci-e links between the components to the ethernet port on the device.

This is what companies are doing and you have to be very careful.

Another thing to consider is they will put 802.11ac antenna on it but they'll put a 100mb port on it. Check into that and see if you're getting 1Gb on the port or 100Mb. It makes a huge difference. If you're getting a 100Mb that's why you're getting 8MB/s transfer rates.

Quu said:
In 802.11ac wireless performance on the AC66U and AC68U are the same.

Image Image

Dunno where you got your information from, the CPU load on my AC66U never even goes above 0.01% even when doing huge transfers from WiFi to Ethernet.
Click to expand...
 
@pragmatius the AC66U has gigabit ports, which is why when I use the thunderbolt Ethernet adapter with the rMBP I get 100MB/s performance.

@Quu, I think you wrote in another thread that you were getting 70MB/s when reading from your server to the rMBP. Could you post how fast you are able to write back to the server? That's the path that I am experiencing slowness. Also, what version of the Asus firmware are you running? I would love to see the settings you are using. Please PM me if possible.
 
Can you post a read and write speed test of your imac?

Are you really sure you get a 1GBit Wireless Connection? which program do you use to test it?

Do you use 2,4 Ghz or 5 Ghz?
 
citivolus said:
@pragmatius the AC66U has gigabit ports, which is why when I use the thunderbolt Ethernet adapter with the rMBP I get 100MB/s performance.

@Quu, I think you wrote in another thread that you were getting 70MB/s when reading from your server to the rMBP. Could you post how fast you are able to write back to the server? That's the path that I am experiencing slowness. Also, what version of the Asus firmware are you running? I would love to see the settings you are using. Please PM me if possible.
Click to expand...

I don't have that rMBP anymore. I last had one in January. I went through five of them all with different screen issues and gave up. So I cannot provide you with any benchmarks.

But when I had it, 2013 Haswell rMBP with the 1TB SSD combined with the Asus AC66U I was getting easily 70MB/s (560Mb/s) transfer rates. That's half of a 1Gb ethernet performance.

That was with my rMBP about three-four feet away from the AC66U as I use both of them in my office mostly.

I was doing a more than 300GB Time Machine transfer and I could see the bandwidth use in the menubar from iStat Menus which is why I could get a pretty good idea of what I saw.

The AC66U firmware I used was the Merlin 3rd party firmware. It gives better performance in my testing and is more stable. Use the most up to date one it runs best.

And make sure whatever you do, DO NOT turn on QoS or per IP bandwidth monitoring in the firmware. If you do either of these things it deactivates the HW Acceleration for networking and you will never get over 150Mb/s transfers because all the packets now go through the CPU instead of remaining in the dedicated networking hardware. This is a very important feature (HW Acceleration) if you want high throughput.

Hope this helps. By the way I do have a PCIe 802.11ac adapter on a Windows PC (PCIe-66U also from Asus) which gets 550-850Mb/s transfers between it and the router I can do benchmarks on that if you want but it's not a rMBP so the charts will probably not be useful.
 
Thanks Quu, just tried the latest Merlin build and saw the same problem. I also tried the TomatoUSB firmware and it's much better! From iMac to rMBP, I get about 40MB/s. From rMBP to imac, I get about 35 MB/s.

Same channel, same settings. I wonder what could be causing it. Bottom line is that I'm trying to determine if there's something wrong with my rMBP given I've read of wifi problems with this model, and mine is a brand new refurb.
 
What speed is the rMBP negotiating at?

Hold ALT and then click on the WiFi signal in your Mac's menu bar and look at the transmit rate.
 
Hmm that is great negotiated speed. Have you tried another protocol apart from AFP? Like FTP?
 
Quu said:
In 802.11ac wireless performance on the AC66U and AC68U are the same.

Image Image

Dunno where you got your information from, the CPU load on my AC66U never even goes above 0.01% even when doing huge transfers from WiFi to Ethernet.
Click to expand...

People are tossing around a few different units here... the above charts are in Mbits/s... converting those to MB/s that many people have been referencing the max speed for the router the OP is using is: 37.63 MB/s (MegaBytes).

Network hardware speeds are marketed in MegaBits/second (Mbit/s), where Mac OS shows transfer speeds in MegaBytes/s (MB/s).
 
TheIguana said:
People are tossing around a few different units here... the above charts are in Mbits/s... converting those to MB/s that many people have been referencing the max speed for the router the OP is using is: 37.63 MB/s (MegaBytes).

Network hardware speeds are marketed in MegaBits/second (Mbit/s), where Mac OS shows transfer speeds in MegaBytes/s (MB/s).
Click to expand...

I think we are all aware of that haha - Mb = Megabit, MB = Megabyte.

The chart above shows one site comparing a bunch of routers, we don't know if they had HW Acceleration turned on or not for the Asus routers. But it's shown in their testing that the 66U and 68U perform about the same within the same margin of error.

That was why I posted that chart, not to get the total maximum performance.

I think we can all agree though when you get a router that quotes 1.3Gb/s transfer speeds on 802.11ac you'll never get anywhere near that. In my testing I got about 560Mb/s (70MB/s) which is less than half 1.3Gb/s (1300Mb/s or 162.5MB/s).

Wireless doesn't come close to wired ethernet yet but 802.11ac is pretty good. Honestly 35-40MB/s I'd still be happy with that over AC. It's better than you'll ever see over 802.11n that's for sure.
 
I agree with TomatoUSB I am seeing decent performance, but not under any of the Asus firmware. Previously I had the apple extreme timeport capsule and I'm wondering if I made a mistake switching to the Asus. I'm hosting time machine on my iMacs internal drive for the rMBP. This review shows more of the performance that I was hoping for...

http://www.macworld.com/article/2048946/os-x-update-doubles-802-11ac-time-capsules-performance.html
 
Wireless speeds have become so high, your disks are bottlenecks now. You should remove them as variables in speed tests. Read from a remote disk-independent stream (like /dev/zero), write to a local disk-independent stream (like /dev/null). Something like:

Code: 
$ ssh other-machine cat /dev/zero | pv > /dev/null

Example :

Code: 
$ ssh 10.0.0.2 cat /dev/zero | pv > /dev/null
13.9MiB 0:00:08 [1.91MiB/s] [                    <=>        ]

Basically asking a remote machine to build a never-ending stream of null-bytes as fast as the CPU can spit them out, writing them to a local black hole, printing the receiving speed via pv (can be installed via Homebrew).
 
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