X7 Wifi performance and Benchmarks?

[mcurole]

I have tried several roms for the X7 and read about many more. Most are now running XBMC and the majority of apps pretty well. But one thing i dont see is the wifi or antutu performance of the various roms. I still have buffering issues and sometimes my wifi performance is worse on download than on upload (which to me is weird). Sometimes i reboot the X7 and the performance changes drastically. Are their measurable and reproducible differences in wifi performance for different roms? I would think that is a critical component of the performance of a rom. I am not personally proficient enough in wifi networking to testify to any tests I might run. Thank god for easy wifi setup programs. I know some people have just given up on wifi and only run ethernet. I also rarely see comparisons on how fast roms actually perform. I am not hung up on antutu as a performance benchmark but it is used fairly often to benchmark devices and roms. I would actually appreciate any benchmark comparisons. I have currently switched over to Minix ver 10 with the minix XBMC running Istream and I find it laggy and slow with lots of buffering. I haven't installed many other apps to slow it down. Just wifi analyzer and speedtest.net. The wifi analyzer shows very strong signal from my Linksys EA4500 on my 50Mbps cable connection, but i still have serious buffering issues (Game of Thrones in HD via Simply Movies) and the speedtest can vary from 5Mpbs on one boot to 25Mbps after reboot with buffering still in XBMC later on.

[jacknjill10101]

I get the same thing on 3 different Android devices, so this is more a router setting. On my iPad and PC the speed is fine. I recently change my router wifi setting to wpa/wpa2 +AES authentication. That seemed to speeded up my wifi for android devices.

[Productivity]

Just FYI, my X7 gets max 1MBps and my windows laptop gets 8MBps on my wifi N network in the same location. It just manages 1080p TV shows most of the time but sometimes the speed dips and it skips and skips! Need to lay ethernet!

[mcurole]

Android Bob did a nice comparison between the minix rom (not sure which version) and finless 1.9 and documented a significant improvement in wifi performance. I found it in this thread. http://www.freaktab.com/showthread.p...ng-can-be-done Has anyone else done any comparisons of other roms to document wifi performance? I cant run a hard wired ethernet cable to my X7.

[Android Bob]

Router: Linksys E4200v1 2.4/5GHz (300/450Mbits) with TomatoUSB fw.
NAS: QNAP TS-112 with USB TV Tuner attached.
NEO X7 WiFi: 5GHz connection at 65Mbits; real world bandwidth potential max ~40Mbps(5MBps)

Original Finless v1.9 without TCP buffer modification

Steaming 480p(SD) TV using 5GHz WiFi to a NEO X7 using Finless v1.9 is fine.
This translates loosely to peaks of 3.5Mbits and an average over 2Mbps.

However, if I bump this up to 720p(HD) in the same environment I get excessive pixelisation and hangs/dropouts.
This translates loosely to peaks of 12Mbits and an average over 8Mbps.

Using 100Mbit Ethernet all of the above can be viewed seamlessly without any problems.



If we look at a 150MB file being downloaded to the NEO X7 over 5GHz WiFi via another 5GHz client(Windows 8.1 sharing 5GHz WiFi) from a NAS on Gbit Ethernet, we get a very consistent 2.04MBytes/16Mbits download. This increase to 18Mbps when the only 5GHz WiFi client was the NEO X7.

If we transfer the same file over Ethernet we get a peak transfer rate of 10.2MBps (~80Mbps), where the 100Mbit Ethernet is limiting the write IO to the SD card (SanDisk Extreme 44MBytes write as tested)

Environmental difference is WiFi v Ethernet.

As a crazy Ivan test, I used 5GHz WiFi(200Mbits real bandwidth) on my i5-4250U Windows 8.1 NUC box and streamed the same 720p HDTV via XBMC/TVHeadend and it's fine.

So it's not a router/WiFi environmental issue it seems to be very specific to buffering in the NEO X7 box when using 3Mbits plus WiFi streamed throughput.

After Finless v1.9 modification applied

http://www.freaktab.com/showthread.php?13800-NEW-Minix-Neo-X7-Finless-1-9-ROM

This implies that Minix NEO X7 fw v10 OR Finless v1.9(with updated/revised init.rc) should provide good WiFi throughput within the scope of the 65Mbit WiFi adapter.

5GHz WiFi

And here's a picture girls and boys.



With the Finless v1.9 fw init.rc TCP buffer modification made to mirror the original Minix NEO X7 v10 fw release, we now see 29.6Mbps over 5GHz WiFi using Finless v1.9, where in the past we only saw a max of 18Mbps.
This modification has also meant that 720p streamed HDTV can be viewed without any picture breakups or hangs/freezes.

If we look at iPerf again we now see ~32Mbps download over 5GHz WiFi, this is a drop from the original unmodified Finless v1.9 which was reporting 40Mbps download. So further tuning of the TCP buffers could provide a sweet spot, but at least with the current(12-JUL-2014) modified Finless v1.9 and 32Mbps 5GHz WiFi download we get stable streaming of 720p in the range of 14Mbps-8Mbps (not tested 1080p)

Ethernet



If we look at Ethernet throughput again, we see peaks of 10.5MBtyes(~84Mbits) which is pushing up against the limits of 100Mbit Ethernet. So we can say after the 'mod' of Finless v1.9, Ethernet has retained it's ~80Mbits real throughput.

Thank you to Minix for the core fw, Finless Bob for his tireless work on tweaking the NEO X7 and Ant for his TCP buffer mod.