gfblip suggests packet loss with Asus XT8, even when using the wired ethernet

[carbocation]

I am using http://gfblip.appspot.com/ to look at the performance of my XT8 Asus router. (There is some discussion of this tool at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33445178 ). In this case, I'm mostly focused on the wired aspect of the router because I imagine many different things could cause temporary bad performance for WiFi, but I'm posting in this forum because my router is a wireless XT8.

This tool attempts to make a request both to your local router (green), and to something on the web (blue), and cleverly uses the response time for the error message that it receives as a ping estimate. Packet loss is indicated as a red blip. I like it because it is visually easy to interpret and has defaults that are more likely to pick up a brief problem than the usual command line ping defaults.

One thing that I have observed is that using this tool, my router seems to have a fair amount of packet loss, even when my devices are wired in. (One of my devices is wired directly to the main router while the other is wired in to the secondary XT8, but that's connected to the main XT8 with a wired ethernet backhaul). This loss occurs (though not in the exact same pattern) for multiple devices that are wired to either XT8.

This is with XT8 firmware 3.0.0.4.386_49873.

Have other people seen similar findings with their Asus routers? If so, any success in mitigating them?

 

[tgl]

One thing that I have observed is that using this tool, my router seems to have a fair amount of packet loss, even when my devices are wired in.

How much is "a fair amount"? I don't track ping rates directly to my XT8s, but I do have a script that tracks ping successes between a machine hard-wired to one XT8 and a machine hard-wired to another. When things are working reasonably well, the number of dropped pings it counts is a few per million (to be exact, 2 drops out of 834900 tries since the last reboot in mid-October). I'd assume that basically all of those are lost on one direction or the other of the wireless hop, not on the wires.

I did try a straight ping to the main XT8 while composing this answer, and got 0 drops in 1000 tries:

1000 packets transmitted, 1000 received, 0% packet loss, time 1023008ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.202/0.306/0.873/0.057 ms

but of course that's not a large enough sample to prove much.

Have other people seen similar findings with their Asus routers? If so, any success in mitigating them?

The usual recommendation is to try some other firmware version(s), because ASUS seems completely unable to put out a fully bug-free release for this hardware. In my case I've got 386.42095 on the main unit and 386.49873 on the remote ... I tried updating the main to 386.49873 a few months ago, and that failed miserably, but it seems OK on the remote. Don't ask me why. Another promising line of thought is to disable any features you don't really need. (I'm running mine as simple APs, no routing or filtering going on. Actually the remote is even dumber than that, it's set as a media bridge.)