ath9k wireless connection extremely slow

[Kent deVillafranca]

I'm not quite sure which package this bug belongs to, but it's a major problem I'm experiencing with Ubuntu Natty.

I have a wireless-n wireless adapter on my computer, which uses the ath9k driver. Network Manager says that I'm connected with a speed of 130 MB/s. However, my network connection is incredibly slow. I did a test, transferring a large file over my wireless LAN, and the average speed was 25 kB/s.

Let me repeat that.
File transfer. Wireless LAN. 25 KILOBYTES per second.

However, if I compile and install the ath9k driver from compat-wireless-2.6, found at wireless.kernel.org, my speeds increase drastically. With the compat-wireless ath9k driver, my wireless LAN file transfer test gets an average speed of 4.2 MB/s.

Regular Ubuntu ath9k driver: 25 kB/s
compat-wireless ath9k driver: 4.2 MB/s

Something is very wrong with the ath9k driver that comes with Ubuntu.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: network-manager 0.8.4~git.20110319t175609.d14809b-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.41-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
CRDA: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Date: Thu Apr 7 19:46:17 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/sbin/NetworkManager
IfupdownConfig:
 auto lo
 iface lo inet loopback
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Alpha amd64 (20110302)
IpRoute:
 192.168.0.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.0.152 metric 2
 169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0 scope link metric 1000
 default via 192.168.0.1 dev wlan0 proto static
NetworkManager.state:
 [main]
 NetworkingEnabled=true
 WirelessEnabled=true
 WWANEnabled=true
ProcEnviron: PATH=(custom, no user)
RfKill:
 0: phy0: Wireless LAN
  Soft blocked: no
  Hard blocked: no
SourcePackage: network-manager
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-03-24 (14 days ago)

[Chereji Mihai (croncobaurul)]

I can also confirm this on a Asus X71 SL laptop, with a Atheros 928X wireless adapter. Same symptoms as above.

[Alexander Hungenberg (alexander-hungenberg-gmail)]

same for me. Performance is very bad.

Sometimes it's quite ok for a few seconds, but most time I get about 0 - 100kb/s with a 25 MBit Internet connection. Maverick was much better.

[Neil Vergottini (nvergottini)]

Same here on my HP dv5-2043cl. lspci shows the following:

02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

Performance gets better if I go into the same room as my AP, but it is still half what I get if I connect directly to the AP with a wire.

[Neil Vergottini (nvergottini)]

I should clarify that my connection to the Internet is much slower over wifi compared to a wired connection.

[theanswriz42 (theanswriz42)]

I'm having similar issues though even the latest 2.6.38.2 compat-wireless drivers don't seem to be helping. It's a driver/kernel issue as reported at https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31452

[Snck3rs (spamschrott)]

dito. i've got the same problem with my Acer Aspire 6530G

Thats what lspci says:

09:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

[Andy Barilla (andybarilla)]

I have the same problem. There is a significant decrease, more than 10x, from Natty then in Maverick.

My lspci:
03:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

And no errors in dmesg.

[Andy Barilla (andybarilla)]

I found another reference to the same problem (#735171) and tried the driver here: http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download#Directly_downloading_the_tarball

My download of the nightly natty iso went from about 25kps to 2.7Mbs.

[Felix Martens (felix-martens)]

I can confirm this. On my Acer 1830TZ with AR9287 it's the same in an 300Mbit Wireless environment the connection is incredibly slow in natty (tested since alpha 3) while under maverick it works quite well. The interesting thing is that under maverick for some time i used the backports wireless driver so this should be the backported natty driver ....

The compat-wireless driver mentioned in the post above solves the problem for me too.

[Jan Nijtmans (jan-nijtmans)]

Confirming this problem on my Acer Aspire laptop.

I tried the workaround mentioned somewhere
else, creating /etc/modprobe.d/ath9.conf with :
     options ath9k nohwcrypt=1

This works! In my case, the laptop is fast
enough to do encryption in software, and
hybernation is not so important for me,
so for me this workaround is acceptable.

This proves - at least in my case - that the
problem is related to the hardware encryption.

Regards,
          Jan Nijtmans

[theanswriz42 (theanswriz42)]

I downloaded and installed compat-wireless-2011-04-23 and it seems to be helping quite a bit. Speeds have greatly improved and I'm not dropping packets which is fantastic.

[Dylan Borg (borgdylan)]

For me the modification of the conf file worked well.

[Josh Kupershmidt (schmiddy)]

Jan,
I owe you a beer! I have an HP G62 laptop with this wireless card:
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

I have an Asus RT-N10 router, which I had been using happily with Wireless-N+WPA2 while on Maverick. I usually got local file copy speeds of 3-4 MB/sec over this wireless network... until I upgraded to Natty, then suddenly my transfer rate dropped to 200 KB/sec, although everything looked fine according to iwconfig, which claimed it was connected at 150 Mbit/sec.

I tried your suggestion of creating /etc/modprobe.d/ath9.conf with :
     options ath9k nohwcrypt=1

and rebooted, and now I'm back to 3MB/sec local transfer speeds. Thanks for the suggestion!

By the way, I also have a Linksys WRT54G operating in WPA (not WPA2). Transfer speeds to this router were fine in Maverick and Natty, even before I tried this fix. So maybe this problem is limited to WPA2 networks?

Josh

[Jan Reucker (slowhand-47)]

Is this bug related to #735171?

[Snck3rs (spamschrott)]

@Canonical, have you worked on it? My download speed increases to 10MB/sec from internet. thats not the same i had before ( should be 17MB/sec) but its ok for work. Thanks

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Kent deVillafranca, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu better. This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

[ryan fultz (ryan-fultz)]

Try this it worked for my ath9k it was getting too much juice and causing problems set it to whatever limit comes up as your power limit when you type into terminal sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower 8B26
this made it run significantly faster I also tried some other things so maybe the combo of things helped such as changing the dns host file but good luck

[penalvch (penalvch)]

ryan fultz, if you have a bug in Ubuntu, could you please file a new report by executing the following in a terminal:
ubuntu-bug linux

For more on this, please see the Ubuntu Kernel team article:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/KernelTeamBugPolicies#Filing_Kernel_Bug_reports

the Ubuntu Bug Control team and Ubuntu Bug Squad team article:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/BestPractices#X.2BAC8-Reporting.Focus_on_One_Issue

and Ubuntu Community article:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs#Bug_reporting_etiquette

When opening up the new report, please feel free to subscribe me to it.

Please note, not filing a new report may delay your problem being addressed as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your understanding.