Issues with traffic shaping on GL-SF1200

Technical Support for Routers
1

Hello everyone, I bought the GL-SF1200 router about three weeks ago.

Although it ships a quite old OpenWRT version, the device is nice. I got it to improve customization on my connection since my Italian ISP forces me to use their bad modem in which I can’t even set the DNS.

Anyway I chose the SF1200 also for traffic shaping, trying to distribute and limit some of the bandwidth between the various devices connected to the Internet. Unfortunately the router in this stage is only good if you have a 100 Mbps downstream connection. If you have more, like my case, the bandwidth is capped around 100 Mbps and you can’t have more throughput.

In the original GL.iNet interface, the user is warned about the fact that this feature is CPU intensive, but it’s weird that you can use only 100 Mbps. Since it’s a Gigabit router, if you have a FTTH 1 Gbps connection, you can only use 10% of your advertised full speed (and that’s not my case, I have a VDSL 200 Mbps).

I tried to discover more and found interesting things. The router by default has the software and the hardware flow offloading enabled which can provide a big throughput the to device: I can saturate my downstream connection and maybe I could also achieve 1 Gbps. Never tried the latter, I don’t have a FTTH connection, but I assume it’s possibile since the CPU during high transfer in not employed because of the flow offloading.

Anyway, if I disable the flow offloading by the firewall service, just touching the 100 Mbps, one single core hits 100% of CPU usage and the device can’t go upper speeds. I think it’s also bad optimized because during transfer only one core goes to 100% while the three others stay low. I tried also using irqbalance, but got no better results.

Experimenting with custom tc qdiscs did not change much of this situation, so even installing SQM package from Luci is useless. If you want to shape the traffic on this device, you have to cap you connection at around 100 Mbit. If you have more, you can’t use it just because the CPU can’t handle the high traffic.

I also changed the frequency, which by default is 800 MHz. It can be modified to maximum 1GHz. Anyway, not big changes, the device simply can’t handle high traffic. So if you want more throughput, you can enable the flow soft/hardware offloading, but at that point you can’t do traffic shaping because all the transfer is delegated to the hardware with all the bufferbloat that is usually seen under heavy bandwidth usage.

Did someone experience the same behavior? Is there a workaround to overtake this issue?

2

How did you modify the CPU rate? Did you have any heat issues?

3 
echo 1000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed
echo 1000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed
echo 1000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu2/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed
echo 1000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed

No issues for now. Since I enabled the flow offloading, the CPU is not used for transfer.

I think it’s even useless to raise the rate because 800 MHz should be sufficient for most of things not traffic related. Disabling flow offloading, the CPU is involved in traffic, but even at maximum rate and no limits, it can’t reach the maximum download speed on my connection.

1 Like
4

The GL-SF1200 is advertised by GL.iNet to have “SF19A2890, Dual-Core 1GHz”:

It seems it is only clocked at 800MHz. Also, did you find 4 cores?

I do not work for and I do not have formal association with GL.iNet

5

There’s a bit of misconception around that. Consulting the manufacturer, its datasheet reports Quad-processing MIPS32® interAptiv with Two Physical Cores and Four Virtual Processing Elements.

So the physical cores are two, but CPU reported in /proc/cpuinfo and htop are four:

Schermata del 2022-03-03 19-42-02
Schermata del 2022-03-03 19-42-02724×644 110 KB

Talking about the CPU, I don’t really know which is the maximum load of this device. Theoretically dual core processors have a maximum load of 2.0, but this one reporting 4 CPU should have a max load of 4.0? Does someone know that?

Another weirdness about this processing unit is that the system load never goes below 1.0. It can only go above, but never down. If the max load is 2.0, this means the system is always half loaded. It’s not normal, some OpenWRT systems have their load sitting around 0.1/0.3 in idle state.

And the screenshot above is taken with a system unloaded of the GL services which are useless to me (I left only the gl_ipv6 service enabled because my ISP gives IPv6 connectivity). In that state, the system stays always around 1.0, but never going below. With all GL services enabled, the load is usually around 1.4/1.7, which is almost full loaded if the max is 2.0. It’s weird.

6

I experienced the same bug as you - when traffic shaping is enabled the GL-SF1200 cuts the bandwidth by 50%. And apparently it is not recommended to use other packages for traffic shaping unless you are on version 4+.

(By the way, could you explain what you mean by “flow offloading” - what is it and how do you enable / disable it?

7

The traffic control on the GL-iNet interface of this device is implemented with a specific service. When enabled, this service disables the hardware flow offloading, which means the packets are handled by CPU (in order to make traffic shaping). On the other hand, if the service is disabled, the hardware flow offloading is enabled and the traffic is delegated to specific hardware components, which maximizes the throughput (maybe it reaches the full Gibabit speed, but I didn’t tested it).

Anyway the traffic shaping implemented by GL-iNet on this device is a joke because it works only with IPv4. I have an ISP which offers also IPv6, but the way they do traffic shaping is not compatible with IPv6 protocol.

Why? Do you mean the kernel version?

I explained it above. Just disable the traffic control/shaping on the default GL-iNet interface. If you have the OpenWRT interface, you should do it by the command line (I don’t remember the specific command at the moment, but you could find it making a proper search on the internet).

Anyway, after more than one year of use, I can say this devices is sold with unoptimized settings. The CPU rate is capped to 800 while the max is 1000 and there are other settings to tweak in order to maximize the CPU.

TLDR: If you want a device to make traffic shaping, buy this only if you have a VDSL. With true fiber you will have capped speed because CPU is not capable enough to handle it.