RT-N66u high ping issue

[eternalsunshine]

Hi guys,

I've been having this problem for the past two months or so. Whenever anybody in my household connects their iPhone to my WiFi network, I get insanely high ping spikes for a minute or two. I have noticed that Android doesn't cause this problem, as I own a Nexus4 and never experience this whenever I connect to WiFi (same with my father, who owns a Galaxy Note 2).

For example, this just happened a few minutes ago. I'm at home using a wired connection, my brother comes home, his iPhone connects to our WiFi network, and all of a sudden ping spikes:

Tracing route to www.google.ca [173.194.43.120]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 1424 ms 1440 ms 1467 ms 10.125.23.1
3 1538 ms 1544 ms 1327 ms 24.156.137.233
4 1448 ms 1457 ms 1099 ms 24.156.146.1
5 696 ms 803 ms 943 ms 69.196.136.68
6 911 ms 1014 ms 1168 ms 72.14.212.134
7 1113 ms 1124 ms 1045 ms 209.85.255.232
8 1216 ms 1107 ms 1089 ms 72.14.239.73
9 1336 ms 2964 ms 1522 ms 173.194.43.120

Trace complete.

Pings will then go back down, usually after a few minutes:

Tracing route to www.google.ca [173.194.43.120]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 6 ms 7 ms 7 ms 10.125.23.1
3 13 ms 7 ms 16 ms 24.156.137.233
4 9 ms 12 ms 10 ms 24.156.146.1
5 10 ms 8 ms 9 ms 69.196.136.68
6 13 ms 9 ms 15 ms 72.14.212.134
7 19 ms 22 ms 12 ms 209.85.255.232
8 9 ms 14 ms 9 ms 72.14.239.73
9 21 ms 10 ms 8 ms 173.194.43.120

Trace complete.

If I block their devices from connecting to WiFi (using the MAC filtering), this issue never occurs. I tested it by blocking their devices mid-spike, and pings will immediately drop to normal levels.

Any ideas what's causing this? Is it some of their apps downloading a bunch of crap when entering WiFi range or something? Could it be the way I have WiFi set up on the N66u?

Also, my speeds from my ISP are 30down, 0.5ish up.

Thanks for your assistance.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Hi guys,

I've been having this problem for the past two months or so. Whenever anybody in my household connects their iPhone to my WiFi network, I get insanely high ping spikes for a minute or two. I have noticed that Android doesn't cause this problem, as I own a Nexus4 and never experience this whenever I connect to WiFi (same with my father, who owns a Galaxy Note 2).

For example, this just happened a few minutes ago. I'm at home using a wired connection, my brother comes home, his iPhone connects to our WiFi network, and all of a sudden ping spikes:

Tracing route to www.google.ca [173.194.43.120]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 1424 ms 1440 ms 1467 ms 10.125.23.1
3 1538 ms 1544 ms 1327 ms 24.156.137.233
4 1448 ms 1457 ms 1099 ms 24.156.146.1
5 696 ms 803 ms 943 ms 69.196.136.68
6 911 ms 1014 ms 1168 ms 72.14.212.134
7 1113 ms 1124 ms 1045 ms 209.85.255.232
8 1216 ms 1107 ms 1089 ms 72.14.239.73
9 1336 ms 2964 ms 1522 ms 173.194.43.120

Trace complete.

Pings will then go back down, usually after a few minutes:

Tracing route to www.google.ca [173.194.43.120]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 6 ms 7 ms 7 ms 10.125.23.1
3 13 ms 7 ms 16 ms 24.156.137.233
4 9 ms 12 ms 10 ms 24.156.146.1
5 10 ms 8 ms 9 ms 69.196.136.68
6 13 ms 9 ms 15 ms 72.14.212.134
7 19 ms 22 ms 12 ms 209.85.255.232
8 9 ms 14 ms 9 ms 72.14.239.73
9 21 ms 10 ms 8 ms 173.194.43.120

Trace complete.

If I block their devices from connecting to WiFi (using the MAC filtering), this issue never occurs. I tested it by blocking their devices mid-spike, and pings will immediately drop to normal levels.

Any ideas what's causing this? Is it some of their apps downloading a bunch of crap when entering WiFi range or something? Could it be the way I have WiFi set up on the N66u?

Also, my speeds from my ISP are 30down, 0.5ish up.

Thanks for your assistance.

Your theory about a big dump to wifi isn't that far fetched, as someone that has multiple ios devices and looked at their connections and logs on my RT-N66, I was somewhat startled at the frequency at which apps (and ios itself) dumps crash reports & logs off to servers.


Especially if your brother hadn't been on wifi for awhile? And your upstream bandwidth is pretty skinny (500kB/s?)

You should turn on per IP logging & also check your connections list when he (or other such offending device) gets on your network. Beyond crash reports and app logs, there's a lot(!) of things on the phone you can have only occur on wifi, like download podcasts, upload photos to photostream or Dropbox, various icloud syncs, etc.

Some of the destinations you might not be able to identify but even looking at the traffic monitor graphs will isolate the wifi activity up and down and be helpful.

 

[stevech]

first, run a few minutes of ping -t 192.168.1.1
from your wired then a wireless device. If the wireless device's pings are 10's of mSec longer on average, then you likely have WiFi issues, either bad hardware or a neighbor within 2 channels of yours is doing heavy video streaming. Cure: change your WiFi router to a different channel, among 1, 6 or 11 in 2.4GHz. Try wireless pings at the busy hour for neighbors' movies. Or your own somewhere else in the house.

If both of those are OK, then ping your ISP's first router, which was for your tracert (but may change) 10.125.23.1.
Ping that for minutes. If that average is long, they blame your ISP's system, not your LAN.

From the 10.125.23.1 onward, you are at the mercy of your ISP and the Internet.

Try pinging consistently good hosts. Here, it might be 4.2.2.2. or 8.8.8.8

 

[eternalsunshine]

Could it be the way I have my wireless connection configured? Not really an expert when it comes to this stuff.

I'll try out both of your ideas and let you guys know.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Could it be the way I have my wireless connection configured? Not really an expert when it comes to this stuff.

I'll try out both of your ideas and let you guys know.

I think that's kind of unlikely, but hard to determine just with the info you've shared up to this point.

Next time a foreign iOS device approaches your network, hope on to your admin login and go look at:

http://192.168.1.1/Main_TrafficMonitor_realtime.asp

I'm guessing they will be connecting over 2.4ghz, so look at that graph and see is it wildly saturating the upload? Then toggle back and forth and look at the Internet tab, if wild wifi saturation is present, is it indeed proceeding out into the internet? If yes and yes, then try some of the tips from my last post to see if you can narrow down to particular apps or activity his phone is doing.

If it happens only sporadically, when was the last time his phone was on wifi before yours, and what has he done in the hours leading up to connecting to your wifi? If his phone was all crashy and/or he was taking bunches of photos and stuff, there's that weird chance that yes it is looking for first available wifi network it knows and will dump a bunch of crash logs onto it.

You could go into here http://192.168.1.1/Main_ConnStatus_Content.asp, hit refresh, figure out what IP his phone is, and see what and where his connections are going.

My sister takes tons of photos (set to upload on wifi with dropbox or photostream, i forget) with her iPhone and has intermittent wifi at her own home, so when she comes to my house it can, and will start to dump lots of stuff, but I have a pretty steady 60up/10down connection, so it doesn't impact much else.

Again, this is all just a wild supposition until we get more data from another occurrence of this on your router.

 

[eternalsunshine]

Managed to look at the traffic log during a spike. Internet was fine, two iPhones connect to my WiFi and all of a sudden starts spiking like crazy.

It seems like they connected to 5ghz, not 2.4ghz.

http://imgur.com/BMetUg9

Tracing route to www.google.ca [74.125.225.120]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms 3 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 757 ms 731 ms 796 ms 10.125.23.1
3 864 ms 744 ms 861 ms 24.156.137.233
4 1189 ms 1448 ms 1242 ms 69.63.251.157
5 1112 ms 1285 ms 1351 ms 69.196.136.36
6 * 1195 ms 1263 ms 72.14.212.134
7 1250 ms 1341 ms 1383 ms 209.85.255.232
8 1461 ms * * 216.239.46.162
9 1363 ms 1409 ms 1443 ms 72.14.237.132
10 1321 ms 837 ms 374 ms 209.85.240.150
11 402 ms 461 ms 469 ms 74.125.225.120

Trace complete.

===================================================

This time it's taking unusually long for the internet to go back to normal, it's been almost 10mins now.

 

[PrivateJoker]

I can't tell much from that screen shot, did you see sustained activity from the ios devices in the traffic graphs?

I'm guessing not because the #s in that particular screenshot didn't look like the last few minutes had been data txfr intense.

 

[eternalsunshine]

I'm really confused as what to do, should I try some new firmeware or something? I don't think a new router would help, since I already tried that.

When I confront the iPhone users they claim they know nothing blahblahblah

 

[PrivateJoker]

I'm really confused as what to do, should I try some new firmeware or something? I don't think a new router would help, since I already tried that.

When I confront the iPhone users they claim they know nothing blahblahblah

Analyzing it from the perspective of the router would require more info when the devices are connected.

For starters, if you can share some of your screenshots of the actual traffic (check the two wifi tabs, then verify that the activity is actually stuff hitting the internet by checking its tab) as it happens it would help us verify if they are causing it by uploading logs and/or other data, or, alternately - if it is some weird network hang (like you have something on your network that runs Bonjour and is acting weird, I have 25 bonjour instances on my network at this moment and it behaves fine though).

Then depending on how helpful that is you could bump up to Wireshark and start grabbing packets.

There are also developer tools made to test iOS functionality under periods of simulated high stress. But I know nothing about that.

Since it really does seem to be an event where iOS is the catalyst, it might be worth checking Apple forums. There are a lot of smart people there.

 

[Curado Kev]

I have the same problems and I know it's from Iphone 6's pounding the Icloud but now I'm trying to find out which phone is saturating the upload. When your iphone's are on wifi and charging they upload to cloud killing my internet,

Anyway I can cut the upload down to 25% of max so rest of network is not affected ? Also, trying to find out which Iphone it is, I have all their MAC addresses and IP but where is it logged ?

Thanks

 

[sfx2000]

I have the same problems and I know it's from Iphone 6's pounding the Icloud but now I'm trying to find out which phone is saturating the upload. When your iphone's are on wifi and charging they upload to cloud killing my internet,

They're probably not uploading too much into the iCloud - they're just trying to sort out where they are with a very broken discoveryd process...

 

[htismaqe]

There are a couple of processes that will kick off when the phone re-enters the wireless LAN. As far as when the phone is plugged in and on wifi, if iCloud Backup is configured, it will certainly kick off but it isn't really that bandwidth intensive. We have 4 iPhones (plus 2 iPod Touch's and an iPad) that use iCloud Backup in this house and I never see these kinds of issues. It has to be something with the way the network is configured locally.

I have a 30/3 internet connection so I don't have unlimited bandwidth either...