Wednesday 27 July 2016

Draytek Vigor 2860 slow loading of websites (hardware acceleration) over VDSL

A few months back I installed a Vigor 2860 at a client who took out a BT Infinity package. Although the connection was a lot quicker than before, websites were still loading quite slowly and often wouldnt "fully" load.

This was evidenced by the site appearing, but web-browsers still processing the site rather than it every completing.

At another site who had a 2860 (but in this case it was being used for ADSL), I decided to update the firmware. Reading through the firmware patch notes, I saw an interesting thing which said:

On VDSL, if experiencing delays in web browsing then disable H/W Acceleration via [Hardware Acceleration] > [Setup]. This will not impact the throughput performance. 

Whats this I thought?

I turned it off immediately on my other site with the 2860 - and things started working perfectly.

So there we have it, ensure Hardware Acceleration is OFF

I have since noticed that 2860s shipping with an up to date firmware have this turned off as standard, but if you have an older unit it would be worth checking

2 comments:

  1. But WHY is HA causing slowness issues? Is HA faulty? Will they be fixing this bug soon? I've just Disabled it after a firmware upgrade that slowed things right down and now things are fast again. But WHY am I having to do this?

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    Replies
    1. Don't quote me on this, but from my experiences of using HA with Vigors on different lines it seems to be related to Vectoring. Vectoring reduces crosstalk and increases speed. Wikipedia states that "Although technically feasible, at the moment vectoring is incompatible with local-loop unbundling but future standard amendments could bring a solution." so I do wonder if its related to that.

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