[kwlug disc.] WL500g Premium/OpenWRT capability

[Denver Gingerich]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 12:15 AM, L.D. Paniak
<ldpaniak at fourpisolutions.com> wrote:
>  unsolicited wrote:
>  ...
>  > ... just how capable is OpenWRT / how does one know if one is going to
>  > ask too much of it, before investing the cash and learning curve time?
>  >
>
>  Let's take a look at some numbers:
>
>  On a WL500gP, video file transfer from USB2 attached hard drive to a
>  network connected computer via scp:  ~800KB/s with 100% CPU utilization
>  Same for both upload and download.

The 100% CPU utilization shows that your bottleneck is the speed at
which the processor can encrypt data (you are using SSH).  The
bottleneck is not with the network or with the USB2 port because those
alone would not give you high CPU usage.  To verify, run top; you
should see that sshd or ssh is using ~100% CPU (though there is a
chance I'm wrong).

>  Compare with:
>
>  Streaming NTSC TV mpg with decent quality: 6000Kb/s = 750KB/s (my MythTV
>  setting)
>
>  So with the router running at 100%, you will just be able to serve one
>  standard definition TV show at a time.

Not unless you're transferring it over SSH or the encoding step is
very expensive.  Simply transferring data at 750KB/s should be no
problem for the router.  I suggest you try a transfer using FTP or
HTTP from a USB2 hard drive.

If you're directly transferring a video stream from a hard drive
without re-encoding it, there should be no problems as long as it
doesn't saturate the network link (100 Mbps = 12.5 MB/s theoretical
max).

>  If someone calls, I doubt the VOIP phone will ring.
[...]
>  For streaming real-time video, you probably want a server separate from
>  your Asterisk box.  Only a real computer with a modern processor and
>  good hard drives will be able to serve several TV streams simultaneously
>  - - especially HD content.

These require further investigation.  Please report back with transfer
speeds over HTTP and FTP.

Denver