AC68 High upload request kill connectivity

[Guibs]

hi I recently updated to the latest Merlin firmware and I stumbled into a weird issue I have not notice before.

Let say I go with my iPhone on speedtest.net , results I get are 100% perfect on speed for download and upload time which is great but I notice something strange. As soon as the upload portion of the test starts, it seems to kill internet connectivity for other devices, even wired ones.

My kids were playing star wars battlefront on our ps4 which has a wired connection to the router. Well they can play for hours without issue but if I think my iPhone and start a speed test.net, as soon as I get to the upload part of the test, they get connection issue and even lose connection and get kicked out of their multiplayer game and I can repeat this at will.

Seems strange to me so I am wondering if there is a setting that could be adjusted for this?

 

[joegreat]

Seems strange to me so I am wondering if there is a setting that could be adjusted for this?

Hi,

What features did you turn on on the router? Do you run something like AiProtection, Adaptive QoS or Traffic Analyzer?
It could be that the poor router runs out of memory with this features when you generate have high load.
A swap file on a small USB thumb drive would help here!

To find out: Backup your settings and reset the router to Factory Defaults. Then configure it just basic and try to provoke the issue. If no issue: Confugure it step by step towards the final setup and test each step!

With this approach you should find the real reason for the issue - plus add the swap file to overcome it...

With kind regards
Joe

 

[Guibs]

Hi Thanks for the reply.

I reset the router, just configured the most basic feature. Ran the test and still had the issue. I even went and flash the Asus firmware on it (usually I'm running merlin) and I can reproduce the issue.

This isn't normal with a router of this quality. A simple test of my 10mb upload speed should not bring the router to its knees. I'm getting worried it's something physical.

How do I add a swap file to the router?

thanks in advance!

 

[Puppa]

Step 1 should be to turn on QoS. You should input the values returned by Speedtest as the upload and download bandwidths. That will help stop one client from hogging your connection's limited bandwidth.

Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk

 

[L&LD]

Step 1 should be to turn on QoS. You should input the values returned by Speedtest as the upload and download bandwidths. That will help stop one client from hogging your connection's limited bandwidth.

Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk

Shouldn't that be something lower than what Speedtest shows? Like about 80% or so?

 

[Deleted member 22229]

Shouldn't that be something lower than what Speedtest shows? Like about 80% or so?

Yes 80 to 85% of actuall speed should work. From what the op is describing sounds like he is seeing buffer bloat at its finest.

 

[Puppa]

Yes 80 to 85% of actuall speed should work. From what the op is describing sounds like he is seeing buffer bloat at its finest.

How would he be seeing buffer bloat? @Guibs said he only configured the most basic settings, which I think suggests he has not enabled QoS at all.

 

[Deleted member 22229]

Buffer bloat shows when the connection gets close to or maxed out the symptoms are has he described when the buffer bloats it causes extremely high pings and latency during the max out time. This causes other devices using the connection to briefly have major issues. Using QOS to stop your connection from hitting its max can help quite a bit in reducing the symptoms. If this is a case buffer bloat and not something else but it sure sounds like it.

 

[Guibs]

Yes Qos is not enable.

Just for testing, I reinstalled my old Linksys E4200 and interesting enough, I see the exact same issue.

Curious if this is by design and normal. Again, seems to only be an issue when I'm testing the upload speed. the download portion of the speedtest does not create an issue and all internet is working just fine. It's only duing the upload portion of the test.

Even on the same machine, my computer is wired in the upload process of the speedtest, if I try to browse using a second window, that won't work until the upload process is done.

ended up running the exact same test straight to my ISP modem and I'm getting the same results so it seems the issue is related to them after all so I've open a case with them.

On the other end, following suggestion here, limiting my upload to 9 or 8mb/s with Qos fixes the issue. Speedtest upload speed is cap sooner and internet works for the other devices.

 

[Deleted member 22229]

Your connection has buffer bloat. Don't feel bad you are not alone. This has been talked about in many forums including this one. Google it and learn.

Good news here with Comcast is they are working on buffer bloat and expect a fix when Docsis 3.1 starts rolling out sometime in 2016.

 

[Puppa]

Your connection has buffer bloat. Don't feel bad you are not alone. This has been talked about in many forums including this one. Google it and learn.

Good news here with Comcast is they are working on buffer bloat and expect a fix when Docsis 3.1 starts rolling out sometime in 2016.

In @Guibs case, he was not suffering from bufferbloat, not from his initial setup he was asking about at least. The only bufferbloat we as customers of an ISP can do something about is bufferbloat from our own router. Bufferbloat is an artifact of QoS, and since he did not have QoS turned on initially, the problem he was experiencing was that his speedtest was hogging all of his uplink bandwidth, not QoS-related bufferbloat.

If he configured his uplink QoS with the entire upstream bandwidth in QoS and saw a problem, that could be due to bufferbloat (and dslreports' speed test makes a fair attempt at measuring this). His initial problem, however, was not this case. At any rate, I'm glad to hear that enabling QoS solved his problem.

 

[Guibs]

Yes it did.

again, just to be clear, on my computer, wired straight to the modem (no router install), I'm seeing the same issues.

What I'm thinking is happening is that in my area, my ISP is stretching thin on its network to give us 10MB in upload speed to remain competitive (I've had some tech from the ISP confirm me this in the past with my area).

What I think is happening is the upload request just takes 100% of my pipe and thus prevent anything else from going through. So using my Router with QoS and limiting my upload to 9-8mb/s, I am not using all the bandwidth and leave enough of my pipe to allow my other device to continue to use the internet.

I believe my issue might be resolve at some point once my ISP upgrade its network in my Area. They already offer 30mb/s in upload in some area not far from my home (actually they do at work) so I'm hoping that once this is done in my area, that I won't see the same results.