SUSE 10 WiFi incredibly slow

artificialGekko · 11-08-2005, 05:33 AM

Hi!

I installed SUSE 10.0 on my laptop (Intel Wireless 2200BG internal wireless) and set up my wireless card to access my FritzBox WLan Router. It seems to work fine - except for the transfer ratees are incredibly low.

The maximum transfer rates I get tend to be around 6.0 kb/s (although I have DSL2000), running iwlist rate shows 24MB/sec (instead of the 54MB/sec I used to have most of the time when I still ran WinXP Pro on this machine.

Are there any settings I possibly don't know of?

artificialGekko · 11-08-2005, 07:43 AM

Weird - right now I can watch KInternet's Data Rate monitor jump between 1 and 8 kb/sec while I'm downloading Debian with Firefox's download monitor displaying a transfer-rate of 50 kb/sec. Then KInternet jumps to 256 kb/se for a while, then returns to jumping between 1 and 10 kb/sec again. What's going on? *confused*

RedShirt · 11-08-2005, 09:20 AM

Are the rates actually very slow, or do they just display that way while pages are loading fine, and DLs are actually moving along heartily faster?
How long does it take to download a file from the web? Is it going at the proper 256 displayed in the FF download manager?
How about pulling files from other computers on your network?
It may be a mis-display issue with kwifi or kinternet.

artificialGekko · 11-08-2005, 10:15 AM

File-download seems to work reasonably fast, although by far not as fast or as slow as the data rate in KInternet shows. My current Debian download runs at a rather steady 50 to 60 kb/sec, while KInternet seems to randomly hop between about 5 kb/sec and 256 kb/sec.
Websites on the other hand load extremely slowly, most of the time almost unbearable. Loading several pages in different tabs of firefox simultaneously almost always shows time-out errors in half of them while the rest takes ridiculously long to finish loading.

RedShirt · 11-08-2005, 10:23 AM

That sounds like far more than a display error issue, in both Debian and SuSE.

When you run ifconfig and iwconfig what happens?

And can you post a few things like the dmesg so we can see what may be going on here?

artificialGekko · 11-08-2005, 10:54 AM

Here's the result of ifconfig:

Code:

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:12:F0:6E:85:C4
          inet addr:192.168.178.21  Bcast:192.168.178.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::212:f0ff:fe6e:85c4/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:10791 errors:6 dropped:6 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:5624 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:12
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:1084095416 (1033.8 Mb)  TX bytes:27502853 (26.2 Mb)
          Interrupt:11 Base address:0xa000 Memory:c8010000-c8010fff

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:256 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:256 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:18305 (17.8 Kb)  TX bytes:18305 (17.8 Kb)

iwconfig shows this:

Code:

eth1      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"GekkoNet"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:04:0E:0A:91:FA
          Bit Rate=48 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:[censored? not sure if that's neccessary...]   Security mode:open
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=90/100  Signal level=-40 dBm  Noise level=-86 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:6  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:12413  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:57

What exactly does "dmesg" do? In my root-console it displays a huuge chuck of messages which I didn't wanna all post in here without second-asking (spam and all

)

But: I found this while skipping through dmesg's output:

Code:

eth1: no IPv6 routers present

Thank you for looking at this problem!

RedShirt · 11-08-2005, 11:05 AM

Not going to claim to be a Guru here, but I have a few thoughts, and some things to try. I see some things of mild alarm... may not be vast errors, but are certainly interesting to me.

The dmesg is massive... perhaps you can look for eth0 messages, http messages and the like, and just post a few blurbs.

ifconfig posts 6 errors in recieving, which may not be a ton... but I am wondering if packet loss or somethign in general may be at work...

Odd that in the iwconfig your crypt invalids is the same count as your ifconfig errors... but that could be grasping at straws and just be coincidence.

http://www.dslreports.com/tools has a whole bunch of tools you can run to test your connection and a tweaks section for fixing things which are not configured right.

Try the line packter loss test first, then try the speed and tweak tests.

Then try the same tests again with the SuSE Firewall disabled, I am wondering if perhaps that is getting in the way, but given that with debian it performs the same oddness, that is unlikely unless debian has a built in firewall as well(not familiar enough with debian to know).

As the tests are java and broswer based, they should work for Linux as well, but I doubt the settings tweaks will work, you may have to find how to manually configure any recommended tweaks.

As an aside... If you hardser DNS servers do your speeds seem any different at all, or have you tried that? It may be looking into a router to pc DNS mispopulation issue.