Wireless Performance Issues on the RPis

I have been having intermittent performance issues on my wireless connections to my RPis.   As in the terminal or FTP sessions are either irritatingly slow or unusably slow.  

Unfortunately this is not a CPU usage issue. I can have the WLAN connection acting constipated while an Ethernet connection or the Console are humming along. 

 

I have multiple RPis and have had the problem with both Arch Linux and Wheezy running both Belkin N150 and Edimax dongles.

 

The Ethernet running well seems to rule out a USB issue (I think?) but that still leaves me baffled.  the choice of USB port for the dongle does seem to make a difference. In fact I may be chasing multiple problems as I have found that the remaining port on the RPi itself (after the other goes to the hub) provides the most reliable performance. Unfortunately this is not making any difference with my latest incarnation of the issue.

 

ifconfig shows pretty high rate of drops on rx and none on tx....but there are also drops on the ethernet connection rx side (though not nearly as high). I wonder if it is something on my network?
e now!

I am going to move my RPi environment to a second WLAN and see if that makes a difference. Before I do that, however, I am going to try and see if I can use ntop to shed any light on the situation. Really cool little tool. I have installed it on the RPi that serves up Live TV to my media clients. 

 

The question is...will I understand the output?