[Arm-netbook] Performance problems with wifi on the Mele-A2000

[Stefan Monnier]

I've been having performance problems with the wifi connection of my
Mele-A2000 and have finally got around to try and track it down.
I thought at first it was a problem with the 8192cu driver in my (stock
Android) firmware (e.g. its reporting large amounts of dropped RX), but
it seems like this is not the problem.

The symptom:
TCP connections (e.g. rsync-over-ssh) between the Mele and other
GNU/Linux machines on my home 11g-with-wpa2 wifi tend to be *very* slow
(while the speed can go up to around 1MB/s occasionally it often crawls
below 100KB/s), and while such a transfer is on-going interactive SSH
sessions between those same two machines are barely usable, sometimes
waiting tens of seconds after each key to see it echoed back on screen.
Sometimes the communication completely freezes for a minute or so.

This happens with the stock Android 4.0.4 firmware (running kernel
"3.0.8+").  It also happens with the kernel 3.4.29 from the Fedora-18
boot image.  And it also happens with that kernel-3.4.29 using an
external USB dongle (using the rt2800usb driver).

During those events, the Mele is mostly idle, and neither dmesg nor
syslog shows anything enlightening.  And the wifi network is also mostly
"idle" (and communication between other GNU/Linux machines on that
network never display such behavior).

In all those cases I'm using the userland is a Debian testing
distribution, installed in the /dev/sda1 partition of my HDD (in the
case of the stock Android, it's running in a chroot on top of Android).

I'd appreciate some help trying to fix this problem (this Mele is meant
as a home server, so wifi connectivity is very important), or at least
some help tracking it down.


        Stefan