Wireless Speed Drastically Drops With Disk Access/CPU Load

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Ian · Post by **Ian** » Thu Sep 04, 2008 2:53 am

As the subject says, this is a pretty straightforward problem.

I have amd64, gentoo-sources-2.6.25-r7, with a Broadcom 4306 (rev 2) using the b43legacy driver. Internet works great! However, I just noticed, while upgrading some packages, portage was constantly getting stuck and not prefetching. Breaking up the process a bit I noticed that the download speed dropped from ~200 K/s to ~10 K/s when the computer was compiling. I'm not sure if it's disk access or cpu load, but one or the other seems to be killing network performance, and I've never seen this problem on a wired interface. Annoying, not 100% necessary to fix...but it'd be kind of nice to not have this problem.

kds66 · Post by **kds66** » Wed Sep 10, 2008 3:18 pm

Unfortunately I am currently traveling with a Windows-only laptop. When I can I will check throughput on my Gentoo notebook (2.6.26-r1, b43) and post my results. Perhaps it's a common effect.

kds66 · Post by **kds66** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 7:04 pm

Apparently my system does not suffer the same throughput degradation. The download continues at the same speed (approx. 140 kpbs from an internet server) when CPU is fully loaded. My config: amd64, gentoo-sources-2.6.26-r1, b43 (BCM4318).