Slow internet/network speeds in linux, not on windows

[DupermanDave]

I testes my internet connection on speedtest.net on Windows, Fedora 17, and OpenSuSE12.1, and my internet on linux is 1/3 the speed it is on Windows. My downloads are slow as heck, so I usually find myself downloading in windows and then accessing my stuff on the NTFS partition from linux. It's quite inefficient. I'm using a wireless connection (802.11/n) and there's nothing else on the network right now. It's just this one device.

Here is the output of lspci:


[dave@TITAN ~]$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b4)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b4)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b4)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b4)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM65 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc NI Whistler [AMD Radeon HD 6600M Series]
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000
03:00.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd MMC/SD Host Controller (rev 07)
03:00.1 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e232 (rev 04)
04:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet (rev c0)


What other information do you guys need to help troubleshoot this issue?

[RupertPupkin]

It could be that the Atheros wireless driver for Linux just isn't as good as the one for Windows, which wouldn't be surprising. On the other hand it could be your web browser settings, especially if you're using Firefox which enables IPv6 by default (you can change that in about:config). You could test this by using wget to download something (say, http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.4.5.tar.bz2); wget will show the download speed and time elapsed. Then see how long it takes Firefox to download the same file.

[DupermanDave]

It could be that the Atheros wireless driver for Linux just isn't as good as the one for Windows, which wouldn't be surprising. On the other hand it could be your web browser settings, especially if you're using Firefox which enables IPv6 by default (you can change that in about:config). You could test this by using wget to download something (say, http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.4.5.tar.bz2); wget will show the download speed and time elapsed. Then see how long it takes Firefox to download the same file.

That looks like it could be it. I just did a quick test in Opera and got way better results. I'm in the about:config menu now and see 3 options when searching for IPv6. I see "fast fallback to IPv4" and it's true, I see "IPv4 domains only", and I see "disable IPv6" which I just set to "true" (it was previously false).

I'll see how this works out.

-edit-
Nah, it's no better. I'm downloading a few ISO files and they're being capped at about 222 kb/sec no matter which browser I use.

-edit #2-

Seems like it could be a bug. Can anyone else confirm this? I found a mentioning of it here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/81156/wireless-with-wep-extremely-slow-on-an-acer-timeline-4810t-with-a-centrino-wirel

But I'll have to wait until I get home to test that fix.

[gregk]

That looks like it could be it. I just did a quick test in Opera and got way better results. I'm in the about:config menu now and see 3 options when searching for IPv6. I see "fast fallback to IPv4" and it's true, I see "IPv4 domains only", and I see "disable IPv6" which I just set to "true" (it was previously false).

I'll see how this works out.

-edit-
Nah, it's no better. I'm downloading a few ISO files and they're being capped at about 222 kb/sec no matter which browser I use.

-edit #2-

Seems like it could be a bug. Can anyone else confirm this? I found a mentioning of it here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/81156/wireless-with-wep-extremely-slow-on-an-acer-timeline-4810t-with-a-centrino-wirel

But I'll have to wait until I get home to test that fix.

I have a different Wireless card:

05:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT2760 Wireless 802.11n 1T/2R Cardbus

But the exact same bug. Total bandwidth on this compute is about 200-300kb/sec no matter what program I'm running. I'm going to try disabling wireless N and see what happens...

Edit: Disabling N did not help, but there must be a bug behind this.

[marko]

It could be that the Atheros wireless driver for Linux just isn't as good as the one for Windows, which wouldn't be surprising.

I would have thought this is the wireless:


02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000

and this is the wired ethernet:

05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet (rev c0)

REF:
http://www.qca.qualcomm.com/technology/technology.php?nav1=48&product=97

[gregk]

Just FYI I switched my router from Mixed Mode to Wireless G only, and had a 4x speed up. My wireless connection is still 1/3 of my Macbook pro's speed but it's certainly better now. You may want to try the same and see what happens.

[DupermanDave]

I'm getting a new router in a few days. I just ordered a linksys (current is a netgear wnr2000 v1) It's a pain in the butt to log into, but I'll surely try that suggestion.

-edit-
Negative on that G speed fix. All that did was take what was already slow and make it slower. Windows seems unaffected, but Fedora sure slowed down. I don't know if I'll mess with the router settings anymore as I already know it's bottlenecking my internet and it's a POS.

[marko]

@DupermanDave:

By looking in the /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log do you see the wireless constantly being dropped and reconnected? The log isn't maked with time stamps so a good way to watch for this is to do a continuous 'tail' of it while you're seeing slowness on the wireless:

tail -f /var/log/wpa_supplicant.logA good trick to make the new lines obvious to the eye is to hit the enter key a couple times to put some blank lines there. Any new reconnects will look like
a group of text like:

wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with 00:1f:41:9a:70:22 (SSID='wifisite' freq=2412 MHz)
wlan0: Trying to associate with 00:1f:41:9a:70:22 (SSID='wifisite' freq=2412 MHz)
wlan0: Associated with 00:1f:41:9a:70:22
wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:1f:41:9a:70:22 completed (auth) [id=0 id_str=]

[DupermanDave]

@DupermanDave:

By looking in the /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log do you see the wireless constantly being dropped and reconnected? The log isn't maked with time stamps so a good way to watch for this is to do a continuous 'tail' of it while you're seeing slowness on the wireless:


A good trick to make the new lines obvious to the eye is to hit the enter key a couple times to put some blank lines there. Any new reconnects will look like
a group of text like:

It was horridly slow just now (trying to stream the new Man of Steel trailer (sorely disappointing trailer)) I checked the log and I see a lot of:


wlan0: WPA: Group rekeying completed with xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx [GTK=CCMP]
obviously the Xs are MAC address numbers, but I didn't want to post those.

[DupermanDave]

I think this specific thread can be marked as solved. The new router came in today and it's blazing fast, which I don't understand because the old router was still N rated at 300 MBps. Oh well. It was definitely the router.

I should add that, and this is completely unrelated to Fedora but could be related to the router, but whenever an Ubuntu machine would connect to the wireless, every other machine would get absolutely no information from the router. Everything would pretty much drop. And this was only with newer Ubuntu releases as of 12.04.