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Ethernet connection to Slate 7 slower than WiFi connection
I've connected multiple devices to a Slate 7 WiFi router (GL-BE3600). However, my laptop and phone get significantly better internet speeds over WiFi than the desktop connected with Ethernet.
The Ethernet is gigabit and the internet speeds are sub-gigabit so it's not just the limitations of my NIC. Indeed, the speeds over Ethernet are slower than my old router which was the bottleneck before. Also, I get gigabit speeds when doing speed tests within my LAN and directly from the router to the PC. Connecting the desktop to the router via WiFi is not slow.
I've tried different (new) Ethernet cables with no change, and the speed is slower with the same cable than it was with the old router anyway. The desktop is running Arch Linux. I've tried changing various settings on both sides with no effect.
1 answer
It turns out the resolution was the Network Acceleration option. It is enabled and set to Hardware Acceleration by default. Setting it to Software Acceleration or turning it off entirely resolves the issue. I currently just have it completely disabled.
I hadn't tried changing this option earlier, because it seemed counter-productive. In my case, it doesn't seem to cause any significant performance decrease for the WiFi connected devices and also does not seem to cause significant CPU load on the router itself. A benefit of not using Network Acceleration is that the speeds reported in the UI are accurate.
I'm not sure why Hardware Acceleration causes this issue. The documentation mentions that it can interact poorly with Smart Queue Management (SQM). I had set up SQM on the device directly through LuCI, but disabling it and changing queuing discipline settings on the desktop didn't seem to resolve the issue. I don't know if merely installing the SQM package on the router caused the issue. Again, the devices connected via WiFi did see the latency differences of enabling SQM without having their performance destroyed.
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