while copying large files via WIFI I realized that the transfer speeds I am getting are much slower from what I know from my windows laptop. There I was able to get speeds up to 70MB/s, whereas with QubesOS on a Novacustom v54 the max speed I get is 10-15MB/s. Wondering if that can be related to the wifi card , but I explicitly choose the more expensive Wifi 7 card and was assuming that it should reach same or even higher speed than my old laptop, which I own for > 2 years now. Here is the pci info from sys-net and dom0:
My sys-net is based on fedora 42. Is there anything I can configure differently from a configuration perspective? My wifi equipment is from Ubiquiti so I don’t assume it to be the problem.
Things I tried so far:
assign pcores to sys-net
assign sys-net as direct netvm (to rule out firewall or similar issues)
speedtest seems to be specific to internet connection. I am talking about LAN via Wifi. Basically copying a large file from my NAS to laptop and vice versa
no, this is something I did not do. Would need to boot a live cd from USB and check the speed there, right?
Not sure if this applies to you. But, had a similar issue on my WiFi. I was getting about half the download and 1/3 the upload speeds I was expecting.
For me I opened terminals in both sys-firewall and sys-net, then ran top in both terminals. At the same time I ran a speed test in an AppVM. The processor was basically loafing (never more than 5%). But, I was using swap memory. I kept increasing the memory in settings then restarting until my swap memory usage was zero. For me that mean 2Gb in sys-firewall, and 925mb in sys-net.
Once I increased the memory and restarted the sys-firewall and sys-net qubes I starting getting the full WiFi throughput expected.
You gave 2GB to sys-firewall? That’s something; my time around the forums got me the impression that if the sys-firewall’s template is minimal, it can do well with 1 GB (and even less) RAM.
But I can also say I am suspicious of the WiFi performance under QubesOS 4.2.4. Whenever I am on wifi, the qubes use a lot more CPU than when I am using ethernet. Maybe related, maybe not.
I have 64Gb or ram, and never really use more than 50Gb. So, from my perspective allocating extra ram is not material. (At least in how I currently use Qubes) I really didn’t try with less. Just set the max at 2Gb and it worked.
Also, I set all the sys-* qubes to 1 VCPU. (I think the default is 2??)
I use a lot of VMs and with the GUI disabled for sys-firewall I do completely fine with just 400MB of RAM. If you want to prevent a qube from using swap, set swappiness to 10 (low swapping) or 1 (almost no swapping if it can be avoided)
If you installed WiFi 7 wifi card in your computer you wont get those speeds if your WiFi router supports WiFi 7.
If you are using a custom DNS or a DNS that isn’t on your router you def would want to adjust the MTU size till you get less packet loss and optimization. I had an issue with speed and it was Quad9 was not optimized with MTU.
Thanks. I didn’t think of reducing the swapppiness. Just reduced to 20 (from 60) and cut the ram to 1 GB. Ram is split about 1/3 each for used, buffer/cache, and free. And, swap usage is still zero. Could probably fine tune more if I used a min qube. But, that is for another day.
I have checked the CPU and memory situation during iperf. CPU idle (1%), swap using 70 MB (out of 1024MB), memory 490MB (out of 900MB). So for me it is not a resource issue.
Ok guys, I know where the problem is… I was testing the file transfer in Thunar (File Manager), which uses gvfs to mount smb shares. This seems to be generally slow. After mounting the folder directly and accessing files it was much faster and I was able to achieve 40+MB/s.
