How to keep Acer Aspire One ZG5 AOA-150 clock rate high while on battery?
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No error, I meant megabit per second. The overall speed limitation (or poor performance) might have something to do with the fact that I am using an Ethernet/USB adapter for the LAN and the native ethernet for the WAN.
Incidentally, I tried to use the Ethernet/USB adapter for the WAN but that configuration proved itself to be a total disaster as the dynamic IP dropped every few minutes and necessitated a complete reboot. So, no doubt that the device driver for this Ethernet/USB adapter is not optimized or well supported by FreeBSD. But on the LAN side, and with a static IP there is almost no damage :) I mean packet loss etc is at a very minimum, actually interestingly enough no packet loss at all right now over a period of 7 day use.
And my performance measurement is not very scientific either, I simply run one or two Netflix streams (then a few more downloads) for a while and observe how the throughput changes when the AC is on or off.
Thanks for your input.
Halea
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@haleakalas:
No error, I meant megabit per second. The overall speed limitation (or poor performance) might have something to do with the fact that I am using an Ethernet/USB adapter for the LAN and the native ethernet for the WAN.
That might be the culprit! Some USB power saving mechanism triggers on your motherboard, which may decrease the performance of your USB nic. That's why you don't see it under XP.
Maybe you could try to install the USB nic's driver in XP also, and try some network traffic tests with power unplugged, through the USB nic.
Also, you might try different drivers for that nic in FreeBSD / pfSense… -
Interesting thought! The USB might indeed be the raison power savings get kicked in…
I was thinking about digging into the chip manufacturer's website to see if I could find an alternate driver for FreeBSD to address the speed issue, so who knows, there might be a solution.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Halea -
Hmm, that's an interesting suggestion. Whatever it is it must be something triggered by the underlying hardware monitor on the board since pfSense/FreeBSD isn't aware of the power source (or is it?).
It seems unlikely to be a CPU downclocking issue because it should be able to sustain 10Mbps even with the processor running at a fraction of it's normal speed.
Try running 'top -aSH' at the console when running on battery.
Could this be a C state issue with the system continually sleeping/waking?Steve
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I remember Windows has its own power saving settings related to USB devices. Maybe FreeBSD doesn't, thus some defaults apply.
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I did some more testing with the current USB/Ethernet adapter and I noticed that I can get a bit more than 30 Megabit per second when AC power is plugged in and around 12 Megabit per second on battery.
This time around instead of streaming video from Netflix I downloaded a bunch of multi-gigabyte OS ISOs from various sites simultaneously. So, the performance is better than I first thought (with the same hardware, same device driver etc.)Now, the really interesting part of the story. I restarted AOA-150 with its original hard drive and Windows XP OS, installed the device driver for the USB/Ethernet adapter, which turned to be a crappy, no-name, no signature, device driver from 2006 found on the mini-CD that it came with. With nothing connected to the native LAN adapter, I used it to connect to the internet and downloaded a bunch of files the way I tested the router configuration above.
The performance of that thing was eye popping, for almost 30mn it downloaded at the rate of 85 Megabit per second without a hiccup! (I have a 101 megabit per second internet downlink).
Even more interesting, on battery the throughput turned out to be just a little under 70 megabit per second. It went on without missing a heartbeat for more than 20mn before I had to plug in the AC again as the charge level was down to 15% (the battery is new but it was not at full charge when I started my tests, under normal use I can get more than 2 hours of continued use, like netflix video watching, etc., with pfSense as a router I can have it work on battery for 3.5 hours).So, my conclusion is that although the Ethernet/USB adapter is not a performance champion, for a cheap, no name product it's more than decent under windows as the device driver is apparently better designed and implemented. Most interestingly the device works flawlessly without dropping IP address etc. (Whether it activates some sort of power saving scheme in windows XP is unclear given how close the throughput readings are. And in either case the CPU clock frequency remains at top speed)
Under pfSense (and probably FreeBSD alone) the same hardware exhibits a far worse performance and loses its dynamic IP address after a while.Now, having done device level programming in a previous life (Unix System V v2.2 and Windows NT) I know that the challenge of implementing device driver software on these two platforms is equal-weight. So, I guess I am having a bit of trouble to understand why those Ethernet/USB adapters are not better supported on BSD.
That said, all in all I am glad that there is an open source router software like pfSense and very thankful to the community standing behind it. Keep up the great work and thanks for all the help, input and comments.
Halea
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Unfortunately usb Ethernet is notoriously bad in pfSense. You might try a 2.2 snapshot. They're built on FreeBSD 10.1 so have much newer drivers.
Steve
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Unfortunately usb Ethernet is notoriously bad
in pfSenseeverywhere. You might try a 2.2 snapshot. They're built on FreeBSD 10.1 so have much newer drivers.FTFY ;D
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Unfortunately usb Ethernet is notoriously bad
in pfSenseeverywhere. You might try a 2.2 snapshot. They're built on FreeBSD 10.1 so have much newer drivers.FTFY ;D
Hey! Watch your language, there are ladies here :-[
Halea ;D
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Really trying to think of something offensive FTFY might stand for but failing. :P
Pretty sure it's Fixed That For You which didn't offend me. As I wrote that I was initially going to put FreeBSD (or even BSD) but for all I know the USB Ethernet drivers in FreeBSD stable might be much better. I don't know, I avoid USB Ethernet if at all possible. ;)
Steve
Edit: and now I've checked urban dictionary I find much more offensive acronyms. I'm sure Jim didn't mean that. :)
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Mea culpa! You're absolutely right. That's what he most obviously meant and I never doubted it, but I tried to run a joke on him.
I thought my tongue in cheek comment would make it easy to understand with my grin at the end, but maybe not…
The offensive version is when you replace 'fix' with the 4 letter f word and it's popular enough to have made it to online dictionaries.
Halea -
Ha, I'm clearly not hanging around the right places on-line. ;D
Steve
