RT-N66U Wi-Fi Performance Tanks When Steaming to Twitch

[Parallax Abstraction]

Hey everyone! I hope someone can help me figure this out and it's driving me (and in particular, my girlfriend) nuts. We have an RT-N66U running the latest stable release of Merlin. Our wi-fi performance has had its ups and downs (seemingly common with this unit) but has generally been alright with the last few versions of Merlin. However, when I am live streaming to Twitch now, our wi-fi performance tanks to unusable levels. We have 60Mbit downstream and 10Mbit upstream cable here and when I'm streaming, I'm only using around 25-30% of that upstream. I also am on a wired gigabit connection from my desktop where I do the streaming. However, when the stream is active, my girlfriend basically can't use any wi-fi devices and when she tries to do a speed test from one of them, she gets an average of about 1Mbit/sec both up AND down. If I stop streaming, everything settles back to normal. Most of the devices she's trying are restricted to 2.4Ghz and while the router is in the basement and she's on the other side of our two story house, her signal strength is usually good and under normal conditions, she can reliably pull around 30Mbit/10Mbit when running speed tests on her laptop.

I've done all the normal troubleshooting steps, including making sure the wi-fi is on an isolated channel. We don't have super wi-fi crowding around here but it is well out of the way of our neighbour's networks. If I'm doing other heavy uploading such as sending videos to YouTube or sending a big batch of stuff to CrashPlan, I also never hear any complaints from her. It's only when I'm streaming that everything tanks. I've done a lot of wi-fi troubleshooting in my day but I'm at a loss to explain what's up here and it's becoming incredibly frustrating. I've read about the RT-N66U's many issues (wish I had before I bought it) but I'm presently unemployed and not in an easy position to buy another router. I'm hoping this is something that can be fixed with tweaking.

Has anyone here seen this before? I'm open to any suggestions. Thank you all in advance!

 

[wouterv]

At first you may try to stream with a wired connection and use another wired connection to see the effect of this streaming action.
Besides wireless performance there is also CPU load, I suspect that you manage to fully load the router CPU.
The newest firmware versions do offer you a view on CPU and memory load, look at it:

Note: see also the Asus forum with your same question.

 

[Parallax Abstraction]

So you guys are going to love this. There is nothing wrong with the router. The problem was pretty much well, me being stupid and not realising something that's pretty obvious when you think about it.

So last night, I reset my RT-N66U to factory Merlin settings and reprogrammed it from scratch. Today, I did a quick test stream and my girlfriend reported no wi-fi issues. Success I thought! Then I decided to keep my test stream going and a couple of minutes later, she said it had gone to crap again. The router's temperature was normal and the CPU usage was under 10%. I was about to suck it up and buy a new router, then I realised the one thing I changed when I decided to keep my stream going.;

Any time I am streaming or recording something for YouTube that uses my webcam, I turn something on for effect. I've got one of these Metal Gear Rising Revengeance plasma lamps on my desk . It looks really cool and people watching my stream really like having it in the background. It also sits only a couple of feet from the router. I think you can see where this is going.

I didn't bother turning it on when I did my test stream but did turn it on when I decided to keep going. Wi-fi went to crap shortly thereafter and came back when it was turned off. Yep. I've worked in IT for over 15 years but do you think it ever occurred to me that this lamp which is effectively a glass jar full of electromagnetic interference could possibly be messing with my wi-fi? Nope! I'm a total idiot, I admit it.

I really like this lamp so I'm hoping that all I'll need to do is move the router a bit further away and that will sort the issue but who knows. More testing is required. Anyway yeah, I own my idiocy so I thought I'd put that out there. There's no doubt in my research that the RT-N66U is a router that's known to be problematic but at least in this case, it's not to blame. DERP!

 

[kiccolsd]

I'm using RT-N66 for years and thanks to Merlin FW is one of the best piece of hardware ever bought... Rock solid, full of options, good wifi coverage and speed are some of the reasons stopping me from upgrading to a new AC router. Even the famous 5Ghz "gate" didn't impact my judge over this router maybe because i didn't experience the quality drop in this band.