Traffic Monitor (Bogus Network Traffic Spikes) [SOLVED]

[Matteo Guglielmi]

I'm running the latest firmware (378.55) on a RTAC68U router.

Every time I start the traffic monitor (Traffic Analyzer tab) I see network traffic flow anomalies in the form of "giant spikes" (see picture). Moreover the computed cumulative traffic (Total) makes simply no sense (16 GB in few seconds... I'd like it to be true!).

What could be causing such a weird behaviour?

 

[Matteo Guglielmi]

Another picture with a spike two times bigger than all others... there's some kind of pattern here.

 

[RMerlin]

Please read the Note just above the graphic.

 

[zekesdad]

i have nat acceleration turned off and experience the same thing.

 

[Matteo Guglielmi]

Please read the Note just above the graphic.

Yes, I changed that as well but it makes no difference whether it's turned on or off.

I've also tried to reset the router to the factory defaults without luck.

The only thing I can think of is that I'm forced to have double-NAT therefore the asus router is behind a primary router on which I have activated the DMZ function... but then, why would this screw up the network monitor?

EDIT: clearly something is wrong for the kernel reports correct values:

admin@RTAC68U:/tmp/home/root# ifconfig | grep "TX bytes"
  RX bytes:21138076 (20.1 MiB)  TX bytes:12647982 (12.0 MiB)
  RX bytes:124071037 (118.3 MiB)  TX bytes:69253695 (66.0 MiB)
  RX bytes:39198644 (37.3 MiB)  TX bytes:32752930 (31.2 MiB)
  RX bytes:2838900 (2.7 MiB)  TX bytes:99682445 (95.0 MiB)
  RX bytes:24907 (24.3 KiB)  TX bytes:24907 (24.3 KiB)
  RX bytes:952187 (929.8 KiB)  TX bytes:6091452 (5.8 MiB)
  RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
  RX bytes:14511165 (13.8 MiB)  TX bytes:30068883 (28.6 MiB)
  RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

 

[Matteo Guglielmi]

This other thread shows exactly the issue I have.

Unfortunately, no matter what browser I use (firefox, chrome, IE) the problem still persists.

 

[Matteo Guglielmi]

It seems that asus itself corrected the problem (Fixed Traffic Analyzer GUI issue) with the latest firmware (3.0.0.4.378.9135).

RMerlin,

can you include the patch too so that I can try it out?

 

[Matteo Guglielmi]

Well,

I'm testing your beta release (378.56_beta1) which is based on an even more recent asus firmware... issue seems gone.

 

[Matteo Guglielmi]

Yes, it's definitely gone.

 

[wonderous]

Another picture with a spike two times bigger than all others... there's some kind of pattern here.

I confirm the same issue on 378.55, here's my screenshot. It happens only for tab1 (wan tab) and not for tabs 2-4.

I just experienced a major 5 minute router freeze, it was dropping 2.4 and 5Ghz and websites took 30 seconds to load. I thought it was a DDOS attack so I logged on to the router page > Traffic Analyzer and I saw the current, average, and maximum values on tab1(wan tab) to be ridiculous (in Gbps!) but they were only happening for outgoing (color: blue) and not for incoming, so it wasn't a DDOS. During this entire 5 minutes every device's connection came to a crawl, until it was over did was my network back to normal. I only recently updated to this firmware but it's definitely something unusual.