Description: very slow data rate with my RTL8187L device. just got about 1,8 MB/s in my network which isn't normal. used to be normal a few month ago. Additional info: 2.6.39-ARCH #1 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187 Wireless Adapter It's an Alfa AWUS036H I use the kernel build-in driver. It's my first bug report, so i hope it's enough
This driver has not been changed for some time. Please post the output of iwconfig. What is the distance to the AP?
iwconfig: wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"myWLAN2" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:16:38:40:ED:C1 Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=58/70 Signal level=-52 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:33 Invalid misc:1349 Missed beacon:0 The distance to AP is about 2m trough concrete ceiling. It worked great, but since some months it slowed down.
There are some reports of the rate-control algorithm being too aggressive on the RTL8187L. Most of those have been for signal strengths below -70 dBm, not -52 as you see, but just in case, test the throughput after running (as root) a command of the form: iwconfig wlan0 rate XX where XX is 11M, 18M, 24M, 36M, or 48M. How do you measure speed?
I'm measuring with via rsync --progress with a nfs folder on my Seagate Dockstar (gigabit-ethernet). It starts with about 4MB/s rises up 20MB/s to and then slows down to 1,5-1,8 MB/s within a few seconds. Tried every rate, starts high, slows down very fast. The most wired thing is, my internet connection is about 6 Mbit/s, on my Dockstar i got this 6Mbit/s. But with the RTL8187L just get about 1Mbit/s.
i also measured with GNU netcat. "nc -ulp 5000 > /dev/null" on my Dockstar and "pv < /dev/zero | nc -u XX.XX.XX.XX 5000" on my write(net): Das Netzwerk ist nicht erreichbar <=> ] 6,62GB 0:00:33 [ 202MB/s] [ <=> ] pv < /dev/zero 0,85s user 17,12s system 53% cpu 33,658 total nc -u XX.XX.XX.XX 5000 1,87s user 25,63s system 81% cpu 33,658 total write(net): Das Netzwerk ist nicht erreichbar engl. Network not reachable. It breaks up after a few seconds, and my network connection is down. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=20 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off I can get the connection up again, but if i repeat the nc thing, it breaks again.
What happens if you do not use the "u" option on the nc call? I suspect a problem with queue overrun while using UDP mode that is not likely to happen with TCP transmissions.
10,9MB 0:00:53 [ 320kB/s]
Kernel Update to 3.0 didn't solve the problem
Does this problem persist with 3.2 kernels?