In a recent post the WAN2 throughput of a Draytek 2763/2765 was tested to see if it could live up to the quoted speeds on the spec sheet.
Now attention turns to its predecessor, the Draytek 2762. For many the 2762 may still be in use as a dependable unit and offers more or less the same feature set of the newer units. But, does it have enough grunt to support the higher speed profiles that full fibre internet offers, and will its hardware acceleration help boost its potential?
For the test I’m using a 2762ac running the latest 3.9.7_BT firmware. As before, the throughput is measured with iPerf3 on a Windows machine with two NICs, MTU on WAN2 is set at a constant 1492.
Out of Box
Starting with a factory configuration, WAN2 was enabled and set to use a dynamic IP.
Quoted throughput is 400Mbps, however in this test I could only achieve 361Mbps:
Hardware Acceleration
While hardware acceleration is available for this generation of router, Draytek seemed to shy away from announcing or advertising. This seems odd as the single line in the spec sheet states that throughput of 900Mbps could be achieved with it on, albeit with some caveats such as a loss of traffic graphs and the monitor page.
Still running an out of box config, HW ACC was enabled to auto. Subsequent tests yielded around 923Mbps:
Granted, this test using iPerf3 is very simple creating a single session on an otherwise idle router, real world applications may have an impact on its performance.
Next, I thought to apply a basic setup on the router to see if this has an impact, consisting of remote access with 3 ACL entries and SNMP v2 enabled.
Following a reboot, on the next test speeds were back down to a pre-accelerated ballpark of 340Mbps:
Thinking that HW ACC was set to auto was the issue, I manually assigned the LAN side client to be in the scope of acceleration, yet speeds remained in the low 300Mbps.
For a sanity check, acceleration was set back to auto and the basic config setup reversed, returning it to a config where 900Mbps was achieved. Yet speeds did not improve.
At a complete loss, it was factory booted and again setup with the bare minimum of WAN2 and auto acceleration enabled. Speeds returned to 900Mbps. Yet, again the addition of ACL and SNMP brought speeds back down to non-accelerated levels.
Below is before and after the basic config:
Note: Summary speeds are at a lower 840Mbps as a click of the “OK” or “Submit” button on the web GUI causes the router to drop packets until config is saved.
Summary
If you’re looking to get more out of a Draytek 2762, I’d only expect it to reliably achieve a throughput of 330Mbps over WAN2.
While hardware acceleration is an option and can at times offer 950Mbps under sterile conditions, its implementation puts you in a precarious position where the next config change could more than halve the throughput. With only a factory reboot being the only resolution.