Router RT-AX59U uses all my RAM

[Bone_Crunsher]

Hi. I bought a new router, my old RT-AC87U went haywire and kept one CPU at 100% all the time and that disconnected Internet to often.

Bought a RT-AX59U, but its runs at 95-100% RAM usage.

Contacted ASUS support. They said make a hard reset. Did that. RAM at 52%. But after I connected my two USB discs RAM went back to 95-100%.

Issues I have is I can rarely look at movies from the USB discs, I am using a mini PC as media-center. Movie freezes and turns off. When copy big files it can stop in the middle and break the copying. Neither of this happened on my RT-AC87U, and I could look at movies at the same time I copy files, thats not possible at all now.

Is it a bad router or do I need a more powerful one?

Ran SSH and Top command, and it says something like this: 475000K used, 22000K free, 3500K shrd, 19000K buff, 100000K cached.

It says about the same while “idle” and when watching movies or copying except some more buff while “idle”, more like 55000K.

Tell me what info you need to help me.

[Saltgrass]

I think I have seen it mentioned the external drives take quite a bit of memory.  Do you have any NAS type devices you could try?

If you are using the traffic watcher, you might disable that, it does take a small amount of memory.

[Bone_Crunsher]

Ok, but it worked fine on my old router, is the new one so much worse?

I do not have any NAS but i have looked on a empty Synology DS124 to plug in one of my USB discs and i have a working older disc from a broken NAS. 

I do not use traffic watcher.

[jzchen]

USB memory makes the router work hard/takes up a lot of memory, even if your router has 2 GB.  I have one USB connected only, I do not dare connect 2.  Maybe move them to the PC, connect the PC to the router with Ethernet and let it do the media server function.  (See attached screenshot of high memory use on my GT-BE98 Pro.

[Bone_Crunsher]

But it worked on my old router, never a problem.

I dont know if conecting them to the PC will work properly. The discs is used on two mediaplayers and on two more PCs. That means my PC must be on for anyone in the household to conect the discs with movies, pictures and music. 

[jzchen]

You make a good point.

I believe there was a security issue throughout the ASUS router lineup that they more recently have been creating firmware updates.  If it is running the most current firmware this may be preventing access as a side effect of the security fix.

(I set up Samba Guest Access and have trouble accessing the connected USB HDD).