WiFi performance and quirks

[Hal Murray]

I'm not well calibrated on WiFi.  I used to be pretty good at testing 
Ethernets and similar networks.

I've got two machines:  a c2 and an early b3.  Did anything change in the 
WiFi area?  I know the old b3 won't sleep/wakeup correctly.  Am I likely to 
get confused if I use it for tesing WiFi?

Throughput:

I can't get more than 10 or 11 megabits throughput between a pair of XOs 
sitting right next to eachother.  That's XO-XO via the mesh.  The XO says the 
links are running at 54 megabits so I'm expecting a lot more than that.

XO-AP-XO gets about 7 megabits.  I get roughly the same going from a PC 
through a Linksys AP to either XO.

What are other people seeing?  What should I expect?  Is there a good web 
page on WiFi performance?  Are there any special performance quirks in the 
Marvel package used on the XO?

I see occasional glitches that reduce throughput.  I think that's somebody 
taking time out to go probe for APs and such and the radio is deaf when 
working on another channel.  Are there other disruptive mechanisms?

Where is that code?  Is that all at the Sugar level or does the low level 
WiFi/NetworkManager stuff do similar nasty things?  How often should I expect 
disruptions?  (I'm seeing them every minute or two  I haven't looked 
carefully.)


Quirks:

Large packets are flakey:

I haven't been able to get full 65K packets from my PC to an XO and back.  
I'm expecting them to get fragmented and reassembled.  I haven't tracked down 
where packets are getting lost.  10K packets work so the 
fragmentation/reassembly code all works.  I've got a 10/100 switch and a 10 
hub and a Linksys WRT54GL so there are many combinations and many places 
where queues/buffers might overflow.

I've got one PC-XO case where 20K packets mostly work but 3oK doesn't.

65K packets work XO-XO via mesh.  XO-AP-XO works about half the time at 50K.

Anyway, just a heads up in case anybody expects UDP to work with (very) large 
packets.


Mashed packets:

If I send a lot of traffic between a pair of XOs, I get mashed packets.  I 
haven't tracked down any details beyond "errors" from ping.  I'll write some 
code to get more info if people are interested and somebody confirms that 
this happens on other systems.

My simple test case is ping -f with long enough packets.  If you make the 
packets longer you will get a lot of lost packets.  10K feels "good" for 
causing troubles.  Here is a typical run:

bash-3.2# ping -f -s 10000 -q -c 10000 mb3
PING mb3 (169.254.154.74) 10000(10028) bytes of data.

--- mb3 ping statistics ---
10000 packets transmitted, 9857 received, +19 errors, 1% packet loss, time 
147958ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 12.993/17.622/167.841/8.203 ms, pipe 2059, ipg/ewma 
14.797/16.313 ms
bash-3.2#

I'm expecting lost packets.  The errors are the interesting part.

ping -f is supposed to send 100 packets per second or more if the answers get 
back sooner.  The time says 14 ms per packets so it's obviously rounding up 
the sleep time a bit.  If I did the math right, that works out to 10 
megabits/second, 5 each direction.  So the wire is close to saturated if the 
tests above are valid.









-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.