RVS4000 & WRVS4400N Limited Internet Speed

[eruth]

                  Both of these model units apear to have a max Internet downlink speed of about 26 or 27Mbs. I have tested this with 10 different units at 3 different sites where the provided broadband downlink speed is a full 50Mbs, including in my own office. My normal router is a Cisco ASA5505 and I have also connected a Cisco 1840 router and even an old Linksys router and all achieve the full 50MBs speed using a variety of speed test sites. The cable modem at my office and at the other sites have a gigabit LAN connection and the RVS4000/WRVS4400N units certainly should be able to achieve the 50Mbs speed. I would appreciate a Cisco rep replying to this. If this issue can not be resolved, my clients will no doubt want me to install a different manufacturer's unit, which I will do.

Thanks,

Ed Ruth, President

DataNet Services, Inc.

[eruth]

I forgot to add that the units are all version 2 with the latest firmware.

[Tom Watts]

Hi Edward, have you made any adjustments or changes to the routers?

-Tom
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[eruth]

Yes to set them for the applicable fixed WAN IP, Gateway, DNS, etc. and the range of DHCP desired on LAN side. I have tested with everything else disabled (IPS, Peer-to-Peer). Firewall is on but no rules added. Oh, and I do have some port forwarding setup which should have no effect when not being forwarded.

[Te-Kai Liu]

Enabling port forwarding might have slowed down the download speed of RVS4000.

[eruth]

Ok, I just teseted here with no port forwarding and the results are the same - 27Mbs downlink with 50Mbs available.

[chrirami]

Hello Ed Ruth,

I did some research and found the following:

Previous issues similar to yours were fixed or at least the speed was improved

after disabling some features like:

IPS => internet speed, disabling the firewall also improved notably speed throughput

in this device.

According to Cisco's developers and engineering team:

In  the datasheet the speed stated is a maximum aggregated throughput -  upload and download on all ports when IPS and Firewall are disabled. In  the real world Internet connections there are a lot of factors which  prevent router to get the maximum speed - encapsulation, interference,  errors, protocols session negotiation and error correction etc.

The  product has a lot of features, that is why download speeds are not so  high when the device performs a routing. For the raw power, customer  needs a device with less features and more speed-oriented like gamers   routers. If customer doesn't need business features as VLANs, VPN, SNMP  etc., we can recommend E3000 router rom the Cisco Home product range.

My  best suggestion if you have further questions and are really concern  about this issue which is a matter of device's capabilities, I will  suggest that you open a case with TAC so that they can guide you better  about if this will be necessary to contact Cisco's presales or provide  you with some other options you can take advantage of in order to get a  different device or disable the features mentioned previously.

Hope this helps you with your issue.

Chris Ramirez.

[eruth]

Hi Christopher,

I was wrong - my assistant who did some of the testing did not turn ALL the "protection" features off. I have now personally tested with all features off, then re-enabling one at a time and finally, once the culprit was found, turning everything on except that. It turns out that the slow-down is only caused by the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) function. With everything (Firewall, DOS Protection, Block WAN Request, Peer-toPeer, Instant Messenger) but IPS enabled, the RVS4000 and WRVS4400N both achieved 50Mbs Internet downlink speed with a hardwire connection on the LAN side. With IPS and nothing else enabled, max downlink speed was 27Mbs.

So, maybe Cisco could look into this and make some improvement via the next firmware upgrade?

Thanks for your quick responses.

Ed Ruth

[Tom Watts · Accepted solution]

Hi Edward,

The WRVS and RVS routers are end of life/ end of sale.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/prod/collateral/routers/ps9923/ps9928/end_of_life_notice_c51-714312.html

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/prod/collateral/routers/ps9923/ps9931/end_of_life_notice_c51-714313.html

The IPS slowing down internet connection is not a bug. When performing a speed test, the speed test attaches invalid packets to generate traffic which will reflect as a possible security issue. When you perform a speedtest your computer downloads a binary file and then uses 4 http thread to saturate your connection. The samples taken from the speed are processed up to 30 times per second then the speedtest will average those together.

With so much aggregate traffic, IPS doesn't know what to do with it, aside from what it is supposed to - look at the traffic for anything malicious. This is also true for file downloads, your normal web browsing generally won't have a noticeable affect. But a large download will as all packet are inspected inbound and outbound.

-Tom
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[eruth]

Given end of life on these units, what would you recommend for a replacement in the business class line?

Ed

[Tom Watts]

The RV180 / RV180W is the replacement for these units. You may also want to consider looking at RV120W or RV220W.

-Tom
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[Te-Kai Liu]

Given the maturity of the codebase in the RV042/RV082/RV016 series, you might want to consider RV042G as well.