Mike H

I've got four Amlogic S905L3A boxes and an RK3399. Why would the cpu only affect the onboard nic? Thanks eselarm and TrevorH. If I find out anyhing interesting I'll let you know.

First of all I have to thank you gentlemen for reading and writing. Cheers! I'll be honest. I haven't tried the newer armbian builds. I just remember that about a year ago I tried 6.1, 6.6 and 6.12 and they behaved the same. On x86 the onboard (realtek) ethernet works ok under any version of debian tried. On armbian on the onboard ethernet (realtek OR amlogic) I get with BBR congestion control about 7mbit throughput (high latency). Without configuring congestion control I get maybe 1mbit. On armbian on a realtek dongle (be it rockchip or amlogic soc, usb2 or usb3) I get with BBR enabled 250mbit. With an 8152 dongle I get its max 100Mbit. Because the issue appears on different socs with different nics, the only constant is the primary nic eth0. That's always the affected nic. To make things complicated, I don't have hands on access because they're spread around the world. I'd need to create a local test setup with simulated high latency to test things. It's a bit over my ability. I thought I'd just report the bug and hope someone else more knowledgeable would have encountered it and reported their findings back. Seems only I use armbian for high latency applications. Hmm... For the lack of people reporting this, you guys deserve credit for your interest. Thx!

Just wanted to give an update that years later this issue is still there. Eth0 doesn't respond (well) to congestion control algorithms. There is a difference between cubic/bbr but I only get a proper speed with a usb dongle. (onboard ~7mbit, dongle ~250mbit) The dongle is realtek and so is the "problematic" onboard ethernet. So it's not a driver issue. It seems to be an issue with the eth0 config on all official and unoffocial armbian releases. The same issue exists on non realtek, amlogic devices. Plug usb and the problem goes away. Wouldn't it be cool to try and rename eth0 to eth1? Ha!

Hi again Werner. Please excuse the long waiting time. It's taken me a long time to place back the device at its intended location. Here's the requested output. https://paste.armbian.com/alefaladep At the moment I've got it running on a realtek usb-ethernet dongle at full speed (confirmed throughput up to about 300Mbit). Last year when I created the thread we were using the Nanopi Neo4's onboard realtek ethernet port. No matter what we did it wouldn't run at speeds over 10Mbit. And no, the port isn't faulty. It's happening on ALL armbian devices (official and unofficial) on current distributions still to this day. Bookworm/Trixie/Noble/Jammy, with kernels 6.12, 6.6, 6.1 and 5.15 tested. On x86 debian it works right out of the box at full speed and we're talking much weaker hardware (Intel z8350). Thanks for your work. Armbian is definitely the future IMO.

If you look at it from my point of view there's a bug in armbian. At the very least it's now been reported even if I'm not clever enough to figure it out. You aren't showing much sympathy to the regular users trying to help out by such condescending language.

Of placing the device back with a new kernel/distro or even doing testing on it. I don't travel much and my friends who do don't have any experience nor equipment to change things.

Hi and thanks for the reply I have the device running official armbian at my location (already brought it back) and so I'm trying to figure out a way to "simulate" high latency. Any ideas? Otherwise we'll have to wait a few months so I can place it at it's intended location again. As you can imagine, this is something that's taken a LONG time. Many many months and progress is slow.

Hey fellas I have FOUR different armbian devices (one official armbian, three running ophub's armbian) which all seem to struggle with network throughput at high latency connections. It is not a cpu issue and this doesn't occur on x86 debian. Here's the odd thing. If I connect an ethernet usb dongle, like rtl8152b I get the full throughput even at high latency. What??? So it's a nic issue? I thought maybe the onboard ethernet isn't well supported by the kernel so I got a nanopi neo4 with onboard realtek gigabit running official armbian 6.12.3x ... AND it's slow too. Any onboard nic with armbian is slow in my tests. With slow I mean that a single connection gets 5-10Mbit. With a dongle I can get up to 100Mbit on a SINGLE connection from the same device. Why is a usb realtek dongle better supported than onboard realtek gigabit? I don't get it. Does anybody have an idea I could try? What's really difficult is that the problem only shows up at high latency. If I set up a new device at home (low latency) I get full throughput, but when it's in another country 200-300ms latency it just slows down to 5-10Mbit. The workaround with a dongle was just a fluke accident that I happen to notice. I truly believe armbian has a bright future but right now I'm tempted to go back to x86 for my needs and I'd rather not because arm SHOULD be better than x86 for IoT (my use case). Thanks for helping me figure it out. Love your work!