If you force the WAN port on the R7000P to negotiate at 100Mbps (Setup/VLANs tab), what's your performance like? If it improves from 7-15Mbps to around 80Mbps, that points at the cable between your new modem and the R7000P. If those devices auto negotiate a GB link speed, and the cable isn't up to the task, you'll get horrible performance with all the packet renegotiation.
I dont have the option to set it to 100mbps. Options are only Auto-Negotiate, Gigabit, Full Speed, Full Duplex, Enabled.
removed auto negotiate and tried to force gigabit. No real change, disabled gigabit and left full speed and full duplex enabled as well. no real change other than the upload speed tanking.
RE: I tried doing the speed checker link that you posted, but nothing happens unfortunately.
Access it via the DD-WRT GUI > Services > SpeedChecker tab.
Enable it, run the tests and disable it.
It doesnt appear that I have this in my GUI. There isnt a "speedchecker" tab.
"Inconsistencies in DD-WRT". The R7000P is not an R7000, and the builds are probably different. Then again, it may have been added since the build you are running...
I'm now running the most recent build which is the 6/8/19 build.
Was on the phone with comcast "advance" support. We tested all kinds of stuff. Upon first boot speed test shows like 80mbps ... testing again in a minute and it drops to 5ish mbps.
We reprovisioned the old modem i had. now its doing the same exact thing. he tore everything down from an account side and we reprovisioned the new modem. Tech is coming out tomorrow .. sigh.
This seems more and more like some backend comcast thing than an issue with my R7000P. I wish there was a way to "prove" it .. hopefully the tech can get it working.
If it wasn't for your GB result from connecting a laptop directly to the modem, this reminds me of an old cable modem upgrade I went through (DOCSIS 2 > 3? I forget). The higher capability from DOCSIS 3 brought tighter tolerance requirements in the RJ6 cabling that fed it.
In my case, the tech found and removed a splitter in the signal path, and re-terminated the ends. Afterward, he measured the signal strength hitting the modem and it was meeting DOCSIS 3 requirements and things worked as intended.
I hope your cable tech finds something they can fix, otherwise, it's back to trial and error to determine what's flaky between these extremes...
If it wasn't for your GB result from connecting a laptop directly to the modem, this reminds me of an old cable modem upgrade I went through (DOCSIS 2 > 3? I forget). The higher capability from DOCSIS 3 brought tighter tolerance requirements in the RJ6 cabling that fed it.
In my case, the tech found and removed a splitter in the signal path, and re-terminated the ends. Afterward, he measured the signal strength hitting the modem and it was meeting DOCSIS 3 requirements and things worked as intended.
I hope your cable tech finds something they can fix, otherwise, it's back to trial and error to determine what's flaky between these extremes...
Start with the config that gives you 1Gbps, and keep adding until something falls apart.
Yeah. Its a shame. Thanks for your help though, sir. I do appreciate it. Kindness of folks on the internet never ceases to amaze me.
I'm almost positive the lines are solid. There are zero splitters from line into my house to the modem. I was very specific about that when the network installation pro did my wiring and the fact that it was SOOO solid before the upgrade has me doubting its anything "internal". I should at least be seeing my old speeds with the newer modem if i had a choke point someone internal.
The guy I was speaking with all day was dumbfounded too. he said the signals and everything that he could see from his side were solid. Even stranger that it would burst to higher speeds after a modem restart and then immediately tank again. I swear i'm being throttled for some reason that has yet to be figured out.
Thanks again man! I'll report back once its all (hopefully) good just to close the thread out.
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 14207 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Fri Jun 14, 2019 1:15 Post subject:
I was having random outages here and it turned out to be partly due to the cable tap at the utility hut at the road. I'm curious if it may be in some config within DD-WRT on your R7000P, but not knowing exactly that and what driver is built into the firmware for it, I can only make guesses. Hopefully, the tech can find and pinpoint any issues, if there are any.
They were able to prove without a doubt that its not the line from the street to the house. Its definitely something in my network.
We directly connected my macbook to the cable modem. pulled an IP and got gigabit. We then went to my office ... did a speed test ... got crap results.
We then by-passed the R7000P and the TPLink 8port PoE gigabit switch. This is the switch that gets fed from the router and pushes data to all my rooms that are wired for cat6.
We unplugged the cable that feeds to my office and plugged that directly into the modem. Took my macbook back to my office and directly plugged it into the outlet there. bam. gigabit speeds.
So its definitely not the cabling. Interesting enough when i ran the speed test from my windows 10 gaming rig i was only pulling like 80mbps down. when directly connected to the macbook i got gigabit. I dont understand that but its not important right now.
I'm typing this message from the macbook right now. The modem is directly plugged into the R7000P and i'm directly plugged into the router as well. did a speed test and i'm only getting 9ish down, but like 45 up.
Its gotta be something with the router and or the TPlink switch at this point, right?
oh .. forgot to mention. That last test I did. I had the modem plugged into a random port on the back of the R7000P and NOT the wan port like it normally would be connected to. so my laptop pulled the public IP. I got the speeds mentioned above in that configuration.
now that i have the cable modem plugged back directly to the WAN port and my macbook directly plugged into the router ... i'm back to 5ish down 5ish up.
I'm tempted to wipe the router settings and start from scratch, but i really dont want to go back through and reconfigure alllllll the things i have setup.
would any settings on the router drastically reduce the router throughput like this? This is actually my second R7000P. i fried my first one doing an update. I have the usb to serial connection coming in any day now and i'm going to try to bring it back from the dead and use the stock netgear firmware. Figured in the meantime that would be a good control to see if it is ddwrt or just the hardware itself.
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 14207 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 3:32 Post subject:
dustinarden wrote:
Disabled the VPN client I had running on the router and now speeds in my office are consistently 60-80mbs.
That doesnt make any sense to me.
VPN is a bottleneck and is limited by hardware. You can't expect full throughput over VPN. The only other things I know that directly affects throughput is CPU clocking, tcp timeout tweaks, SFE, QoS, etc. Any network related setting, including firewalling and such. I have tested direct connectivity and over my local stuff and my speeds aren't much different, which makes me wonder why my ISP is still charging me for the advertised speeds, if they aren't giving it to me. It would be nice to have fiber here, or at least full DOCSIS 3.0 speeds. The best I can get is 50 down, 10 up. Which isn't horrible, but.
No I wasnt expecting full throughput over VPN. I'm aware of the network performance hit potential. When I first upgraded the modem and got network connectivity I removed the one IP that was listed in the policy based routing. It was just one of my NAS's.
Nothing else in the house was going out the VPN connection during all of these issues.
I'm assuming the limitations were more cpu/ram performance related on the R7000P which has me wondering what other settings am i utilizing that could drain my bandwidth potential?
ok ok ok .. i know everyone is sick of seeing this thread bumped to the top, but I have updates after testing and more requests for help, haha.
So. As i may or may not have mentioned I had a spare R7000P that I had bricked a while back. I took it out of storage and (after finding out how to flash the stock firmware via a combo of the serial connection and tftp) its back to the most recent version of its stock netgear firmware. I havent really configured anything on it other than to turn off wifi. I then hooked it directly to the cable modem and my macbook to it via ethernet and sure enough ... gigabit speeds. I got extra adventurous and plugged in the cat6 that runs back to my office into the stock netgear. came back to my office .. refreshed IP's and bam .. gigabit.
So its definitely the DDWRT R7000P that I am using as my main router that is the bottleneck. Like i said earlier disabling the VPN service (even though nothing was going out through that VPN via the policy based routing) got me back to 80-100mbps via wired ethernet anywhere I tested it.
I REALLY dont want to lose the functionality of DDWRT as i've been using it for what seems like decades but i also dont want to cut my bandwidth down by 9/10ths either.
I've read a few threads about disabling all services and all the other stuff can boost bandwidth throughput .. what services should I be focusing on? The main thing i'd want to retain of functionality is my dhcp reservations I guess. I really dont want to use the stock netgear firmware if I dont have to.
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 14207 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Sun Jun 16, 2019 1:46 Post subject:
I would screenshot all of your current configs page by page, tab by tab, etc., THEN reset to defaults and start fresh, doing only basic stuff until you find what breaks it. Other than that, I am not sure what to advise.
