Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 16:30 Post subject: Need help: what could cause this rising ping over time?
Setup: Previous R8500 with latest Kong release
Now: R8000P with latest Netgear FW
PC: Windows 10 with latest updates
Tried: Realtek wired NIC (latest FW) and Realtek wireless card (latest FW)
Internet: Spectrum out of Tampa: 230Mbps/24Mbps
OK my DD-WRT friends. I desperately need some help from the experts. Over time, say several hours, I have increasing latency (ping) that affects things like YouTube, gaming, and eventually the whole network. I've been at this, diagnosing for over a week and still can't find a solution.
The symptom is that my ping rises slowly over time to the point where, after say a day, it gets so bad that I start getting packet loss. I've replaced cables, tried wired and wireless, tried both DD-WRT and Netgear firmware, and even replaced my R8500 (where I initially saw the problem) with a new R8000P. The problem continues no matter what I do so this is obviously not a DD-WRT problem but I'm asking here because you guys know a lot more about this stuff than I do.
My current setup is an R8000P with cable internet (Spectrum from Tampa area). Internet speed is 230Mbps down, 24 Mbps up. The attached graph from PingPlotter shows the scenario. After just a couple hours, my ping starts rising and then if I simply disable my PC's internet connection and re-enable it, the ping goes back down to normal. The red area on the graph is where I disabled and re-enabled my network card in Windows 10 "Change adapter settings". You can see that after the reset, ping goes back to normal.
Does anyone know of something that might cause the router to get "backed up" or something: something that might clear by disabling/re-enabling the adapter? When it gets really bad (if I let it go long enough), I can't even access the router itself, or when I ping the router, the router itself will have a relatively high ping: like 70ms. When after resetting my adapter, it goes back to 1ms (for a while).
I don't think it's my PC since my wired card and wireless card are two separate cards and both do this. In addition, my son's PC on 5Ghz wireless in another room seems to also be afflicted with the higher pings which would lend itself to something in the router and not the PC. I do run Blue Iris for running 7 wireless (2.4 Ghz) security cameras. This problem just started maybe 2 weeks ago but maybe the wireless traffic from those cameras is bottlenecking somewhere even though I've been running those for years?
Just an update. This morning after the R8000P (on Netgear's latest FW) had been running for 2 days, a computer reset didn't seem to help much with the high pings and all 7 security cameras couldn't connect on the 2.4 Ghz WiFi. Rebooted the router and all is fine again.
Just wish I could figure out what is making the router unhappy. It's like something is getting backed up on the router but the logs show nothing suspicious. Both the Netgear and DD-WRT firmware (when I was on the R8500) do it as do both routers (R8500 and R8000P) so I'm at a loss. Right now I guess I'm going to be rebooting the router about once a day.
Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 1608 Location: SE Michigan USA
Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2018 13:25 Post subject:
Sounds like you may have an environmental issue, since two different routers display the same issue. Have you checked to see if there are other routers close by using the same channels your are?
I'm in a rural area so the houses are far apart. I frequently do a WiFi analysis and I don't see anything close to the channels I'm using. I did just notice that the Chromecast device attached to my TV was throwing out a channel 6 WiFi signal (same as my router). Not sure what that's about but I disconnected that as I never use it anyway. Will see if that helps.
When I ping, I check various sites, typically twitter.com, google.com, pingplotter.com, and the Overwatch east coast server (24.105.62.129) as I sometimes play Overwatch in the evenings. All of them show the same trend. Right after a router reboot, I get between 40 and 60 ping (depending on the target) and over time, they increase to about 80ms within a couple hours and by the next day, they are over 100ms.
Curiously, right after a router reboot, I get 0.5 to 1ms pings to the router and when the problems occur, I get intermittent ping spikes at the router: 192.168.1.1 starts showing pings like 1ms, 37ms, 7ms, 52ms, 3ms, 6ms, 16ms, and so on... instead of a steady 0.5 to 1ms ping when I first boot it. That's when I reboot it. And it goes back to "normal" for a few hours.
Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 1608 Location: SE Michigan USA
Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2018 20:14 Post subject:
Guess not a wireless interference issue. Yes I see devices with remote controls also seem to be broadcasting. I think that is because they are using the wireless to communicate unlike the Amazon Fire TV that uses bluetooth. Chromecast does for sure. Does not seem to cause an issue for me.
With telnet enabled you can run top and see if there is a process taking up cpu time. Doesn't seem likely since you have issues with 2 different routers, but who knows.
Thanks for the help. I'll try the debug thing because I'd like to have access to that, but for now, it looks like I might have fixed it by downgrading to firmware 1.1.4.6 (from way back in October).
It looks to me like Netgear has a serious issue with their latest firmware. I found a thread where some were complaining of similar problems and they gave a link to the old 1.1.4.6 firmware which fixed it for a few people. So far with the exact same setup, I'm going on 5 hours with no increase in ping on that older FW. The latest firmware rose from 30ms to 70ms within a couple hours and within about 24 hours, it was unusable until a reboot. So I'll see what it looks like in the morning but it's looking good on the old firmware.
I wonder if this might be relevant here because Kong's latest FW for the R8500 had the exact same problem. That's why I reflashed the Netgear firmware on that and when it did the same thing, I declared the router as faulty and bought the R8000P. So is it possible that some of Netgear's code (like the WiFi drivers, kernel, or something) made their way into DD-WRT and are causing the same issue in DD-WRT?
The older Netgear firmware held for longer than the latest one, but eventually it ended up failing in the same way. By the next morning, the router was dead enough that I couldn't access it via the web UI. I ended up returning the R8000P and getting a LinkSys EA9500. I've run that for going on 4 days uptime now and it hasn't missed a beat. No rising pings. No daily reboots needed.
Out of curiosity, today I hooked my old R8500 back up and loaded BS R35244 on it with a reset and manual setup just to see. Within an hour, pings to local sites had risen from ~20ms to bouncing between 20ms and about 75ms. A few more minutes and I was seeing 35+ ping to the router itself (with some normal 1ms pings mixed in) and a few minutes after that, pings had risen to 350ms+ and I disconnected it and reconnected my EA9500.
The whole purpose of that test was, I don't want to spend $350 on a router if I don't need to and maybe the latest BS build fixed something. Guess not, or maybe my R8500 is just failing hardware-wise. I'm willing to accept that but I would think it unlikely that the brand new R8000P had hardware problems too that lead to the same result. Since both DD-WRT and the Netgear firmware exhibit the same problem, it's also possible that some device here it misbehaving and causing an issue with the latest Netgear WiFi drivers or kernel. But the EA9500 has no problem with it, whatever that might be.
A mystery, but having a business and running a server here, I have to move on and can't afford to spend more time on this. Looks like the EA9500 will be stable for me although I can't stand the garbage LinkSys UI! Wish I could run DD-WRT on that!
