Choppy, slow Wi-Fi need daily reboots

[jtara]

I have an Asus AC-88 running Merlin 384.7.2.

I have to reboot at least daily (and has to be a power-cycle, not just a reboot from browser UI) due to slow/choppy performance from Wi-Fi to Internet.

At one time, I had the situation where I did NOT get degraded performance between WiFi and local network, that's the strange part. iPerf 3showed good and consistent performance to my Mac Mini from iPad. But now something has changed, and now I do also get poor iPerf3 performance to my Mac. I just ran a test, and it got a paltry 1mbit/sec with one burst to 60mbps.

I have WebPass service, and Speedtest from e.g. iPad or iPhone normally shows anything from 400-800 mbps up/down. (WebPass is symmetric). I suppose now that the iPerf3 results have changed so that the degradations is consistent both to local net and Internet, this is irrelevant, though.

I will notice problems with web sites, etc. and then run Speedtest, and get choppy performance that can range from 10-50mbps. Sometimes as low as e.g. 2. This persists until I do a power cycle reboot.

I once thought this was because I had enabled Smart Connect, but I've disproven that. I shut it off a long time ago, and use 5G band (only) on all the devices I can. At one time I thought there was a correlation with high CPU on the router, but that seems to no longer be the case. This has been happening for long enough that I've been through SEVERAL Merlin upgrades.

This problem has been plaguing me for months, actually I think a year or more.

Time to just buy a new router?

ANY ideas?

There is nothing in the log that suggests trouble. In fact, it happened this morning, and there are NO log entries between last night's reboot and now. (Other than start-up messages last night.)

What should I be looking for?

 

[jtara]

After reboot, just did an iPerf3 test, and got 200mbit/sec with 1m data, and 500mbit/sec with 10m.

 

[Jack Yaz]

I have an Asus AC-88 running Merlin 384.7.2.

I have to reboot at least daily (and has to be a power-cycle, not just a reboot from browser UI) due to slow/choppy performance from Wi-Fi to Internet.

At one time, I had the situation where I did NOT get degraded performance between WiFi and local network, that's the strange part. iPerf 3showed good and consistent performance to my Mac Mini from iPad. But now something has changed, and now I do also get poor iPerf3 performance to my Mac. I just ran a test, and it got a paltry 1mbit/sec with one burst to 60mbps.

I have WebPass service, and Speedtest from e.g. iPad or iPhone normally shows anything from 400-800 mbps up/down. (WebPass is symmetric). I suppose now that the iPerf3 results have changed so that the degradations is consistent both to local net and Internet, this is irrelevant, though.

I will notice problems with web sites, etc. and then run Speedtest, and get choppy performance that can range from 10-50mbps. Sometimes as low as e.g. 2. This persists until I do a power cycle reboot.

I once thought this was because I had enabled Smart Connect, but I've disproven that. I shut it off a long time ago, and use 5G band (only) on all the devices I can. At one time I thought there was a correlation with high CPU on the router, but that seems to no longer be the case. This has been happening for long enough that I've been through SEVERAL Merlin upgrades.

This problem has been plaguing me for months, actually I think a year or more.

Time to just buy a new router?

ANY ideas?

There is nothing in the log that suggests trouble. In fact, it happened this morning, and there are NO log entries between last night's reboot and now. (Other than start-up messages last night.)

What should I be looking for?

Post your wireless config from both Basic and Advanced, we can check for any setting change suggestions

 

[agilani]

disable airtime fairness
disable mimo
disable beam forming
disable smart connect
use different ssid for 2.4 and 5ghz

manually select a channel for 2.4 ghz that has the least conflict in your area (1, 6, or 11 have the least overlap)

make sure you use auto for bandwidth - 20/40 for 2.4ghz and 20/40/80 for 5ghz

and call me in the morning with the results after you make the changes

 

[peraburek]

I am facing the same issue, wifi is not slow, but choppy, it gets stuck every 15-30 minutes for about a minute or two

When it works, it works fast

 

[agilani]

I am facing the same issue, wifi is not slow, but choppy, it gets stuck every 15-30 minutes for about a minute or two

When it works, it works fast

disable airtime fairness
disable mimo
disable beam forming
disable smart connect
use different ssid for 2.4 and 5ghz

manually select a channel for 2.4 ghz that has the least conflict in your area (1, 6, or 11 have the least overlap)

make sure you use auto for bandwidth - 20/40 for 2.4ghz and 20/40/80 for 5ghz

and take two advil and call me in the morning with the results after you make the changes

 

[indark]

as I normally would suggest to people experience weird issue with their router
power cycle and clear nvram by holding wps button

power off the router for 30+ sec, hold wps button while booting on
wait till it finish booting and manually reconfigure from there.
dont load backup setting.

and I would normally leave it as vanilla as possible for a day or two to test.

 

[jtara]

It seems the problem in my case was that I had set the power levels to "balance". Since I changed the power levels to max, the problem has not recurred since I changed it, which was a couple of weeks ago. I was having this issue come up at least once a day!

What seems very strange, though, is that there seemed to be some "trigger". That is, once it got into this mode, there was no recovery other than reboot. It wasn't that throughput was poor for a while and then got better. It was just awful until reboot.

It's also odd that it seems to affect both 2.4 and 5gHz.

Admittedly, I am in a difficult location. I'm on the northern edge of downtown San Diego, and also close enough to Lindbergh Field and North Island Naval Air Station, that there are 5gHz channels blocked out.

In such a crowded RF environment, I'm sure there are complex "network effects" as all of the transmitters jockey for superiority and perhaps there is some "lockup" scenario possible where there is just "no way out" other than to reboot. (Still, I think the fault has to lie with some algorithm within the router, as things are fine for a while after a reboot. It seems the system just never puts the radios into the same state as initial startup, and so is doomed until reboot.)

The only thing that does make some sense is that, yes, typically it affected download performance more than upload performance. That does seem consistent with insufficient transmitter power.

I guess this puts me firmly back into the "more is better" camp, after a brief fling of trying to be a good RF citizen.

As a software developer, mysterious effects without a logical cause and with illogical fixes trouble me.

 

[DroidST]

20/40 for 2.4ghz

from my experience here, if the router did go 40MHz on the 2.4 band, I saw reduced performance.. lot's of neighbors on that band.

I select 20MHz for 2.4GHz

.