Navigation in Router GUI Extremely Sluggish

[waffles]

As of late I have noticed that access and navigation within the router GUI has been extremely sluggish for me. This to a point where it simply stops responding and freezes up. Router is a RT-AC66U, approx. 4 months old.

Here is what I found thus far:

* The LAN itself works fine, i.e. I can access the various devices and machines just fine via Ethernet and WiFi.

* The access to and from the web is fine. OpenVPN is working fine.

=> In other words everything seems to be working fine, with the exception of above.

* This issue seems to be limited to the Ethernet connection. Access to the router via WiFi seems OK.

* For troubleshooting purposes I had unplugged all downstream switches, network and USB devices, so only a Win 7 PC was connected to the router (and the router to a Motorola cable modem).

* I did numerous router resets incl. NVRAM clearing. I reinstalled the latest Merlin FW - no change

* I have tried 3 different PCs (all Windows 7). They all behave the same.

* I tried Chrome and Firefox (both latest versions). Not much difference, but Chrome may have worked slightly better, but far from acceptable.

* I tried static and DHCP addresses - no difference.

* I never noticed this issue until recently (maybe a few weeks). I am not sure what changed. I have regularly updated to Merlin's latest router f/w (currently RT-AC66U_3.0.0.4_374.35_4) and Win7 / browser updates.

* I have not tried reverting back to an earlier Merline f/w. Maybe this is what I should try next.


Any ideas?

 

[tofudreamer]

First thing is to try different Ethernet cables. Bad cables will cause collisions and make everything crawl.

Check your network speed. If it's okay, then you need to look at the router itself. Have you turned on any new features like backup, media serving, VPN or remote access? Each of these uses up part of the processor and will slow things down.

NAS vendors usually put a much lower priority on the management interface than on other services for obvious reasons. Likely one of these processes is using up all your CPU. Have you tried turning them off one at a time.

 

[rlcronin]

Using Eset nod32 perchance? V7 of same causes symptoms that sound similar to what you're seeing. Add an IP address exclusion for your router in nod's advanced settings and the problem will go away. I've been trying to get Eset interested in looking into this since August (and only recently had some success with that, but as yet have been unable to provide useful packet captures for Eset to analyze).
--
bc

 

[waffles]

First thing is to try different Ethernet cables. Bad cables will cause collisions and make everything crawl.

Check your network speed. If it's okay, then you need to look at the router itself. Have you turned on any new features like backup, media serving, VPN or remote access? Each of these uses up part of the processor and will slow things down.

NAS vendors usually put a much lower priority on the management interface than on other services for obvious reasons. Likely one of these processes is using up all your CPU. Have you tried turning them off one at a time.

No changes here - no new features, tried different cables and I am still getting Gigabit connections.

 

[waffles]

Using Eset nod32 perchance? V7 of same causes symptoms that sound similar to what you're seeing. Add an IP address exclusion for your router in nod's advanced settings and the problem will go away. I've been trying to get Eset interested in looking into this since August (and only recently had some success with that, but as yet have been unable to provide useful packet captures for Eset to analyze).
--
bc

Hmmm, I just installed ESET NOD32 this weekend on all of these machines ...... I will turn it off and try again.

 

[waffles]

It does not seem to be ESET, but I suspect something of that nature on my PCs. I temporarily disabled it, but issue still persisted. In parallel, I tried it on another vanilla machine (file server) that does not have any protection - no problems there. So more investigations needed. Thanks rlcronin for the pointer!

 

[rlcronin]

Here's where you put the exclusion. I found that simply disabling protection using the tray icon was not sufficient.

 

[waffles]

I just saw that I missed a 'not' in my post .

In any case, I will try adding the exception. Maybe it helps. Thanks much!

 

[waffles]

rlcronin, you nailed it! I added the exception in ESET and the navigation worked fine. I took it out and the GUI became sluggish again. I put it back in, all good again!

I only switched to ESET this weekend. Before I was using MS Security Essentials, but also had the issue there. Hmmm....


Last network/data security noobie question: is my setup now more exposed after adding this IP address exception??

 

[rlcronin]

Only if the router starts trying to do something malicious, I think. Probably pretty unlikely. Further I am pursuing the issue with ESET support so there's some hope they will find the cause. There's a thread on the ESET support forum about it if you want to follow the progress.

https://forum.eset.com/topic/1389-eset-av-blocking-my-router-web-admin-page/
--
bc

 

[waffles]

Only if the router starts trying to do something malicious, I think. Probably pretty unlikely. Further I am pursuing the issue with ESET support so there's some hope they will find the cause. There's a thread on the ESET support forum about it if you want to follow the progress.

https://forum.eset.com/topic/1389-eset-av-blocking-my-router-web-admin-page/
--
bc

Thanks bc.
The workaround is OK for the moment, but I would like to see a permanent and 'real' fix from ESET soon.

 

[gpb500]

Howdy all...just registered here to post that I've been having the same exact issue. And I've pinned it down to Agnitum Outpost Firewall...the only way I can get around it is to either shut the firewall down completely or disable something they call "Content Filtering" at the application rule level. Like the OP, my issue also began about a month ago. I hadn't flashed my N66U since I got it in July so it has nothing to do with that. I think maybe it was a MS update (I'm running Win8.1x64)...but can't say for sure. Adding an exclusion for the router in my case did not work but I still have agnitum support helping with it. I also have a netgear router I use as an AP running dd-wrt and I have no problems accessing its GUI. Seems something is unique about the Asus gui or how it's served.

A bit more detail about what I see...pages will sometimes fully paint, other times I get partial pages that never finish loading and sometimes I get no pages at all. There's no consistency to it. I did flash my router a few days ago with Merlin 3.0.0.4.374.35_4-sdk5; it didn't change the non-responsive nature of the GUI. I also rolled back my network adapter driver to see if that would make a difference, but that wasn't it either...I'm hardwired from a desktop here using the latest intel driver.

Anyhow, just thought I'd throw my comments in here too for anyone that might find it helpful. And thanks Merlin for all you've done.

 

[rlcronin]

I experienced the issue the very first time I installed ESET v7 beta back in the Summer, so I suspect it doesn't have anything to do with a recent MS update. Time will tell. I am still waiting on ESET to get back to me with their findings from the packet captures I have submitted to them.
--
bc

 

[gpb500]

I experienced the issue the very first time I installed ESET v7 beta back in the Summer, so I suspect it doesn't have anything to do with a recent MS update. Time will tell. I am still waiting on ESET to get back to me with their findings from the packet captures I have submitted to them.
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bc

Thanks...good to know. The obvious answer is security software, but several different vendors seems suspect. Or, maybe this is a more common issue than I was thinking.

 

[RogerSC]

Just thought I'd mention that I have an RT-N66U with the latest RMerlin firmware, and am using eset nod32 version 7 on Windows 8.1. No problems with the web admin GUI here on either Chrome or IE, don't know what might be different for me.

 

[rlcronin]

Just thought I'd mention that I have an RT-N66U with the latest RMerlin firmware, and am using eset nod32 version 7 on Windows 8.1. No problems with the web admin GUI here on either Chrome or IE, don't know what might be different for me.

Its inconsistent. Clicked thru the entire ui? All pages and tabs render ok?
--
bc

 

[RMerlin]

Just thought I'd mention that I have an RT-N66U with the latest RMerlin firmware, and am using eset nod32 version 7 on Windows 8.1. No problems with the web admin GUI here on either Chrome or IE, don't know what might be different for me.

Maybe it only affects Smart Security users, not those only running the antivirus.

 

[rlcronin]

Maybe it only affects Smart Security users, not those only running the antivirus.

I only run the antivirus. I did a bit more tracing today to try to get a smaller packet capture for ESET (by shutting down everything I could find that would be likely to use the network during my testing). Managed to get the capture down to 800k.

I looked at it a bit in CloudShark and saw the last thing that happened before the UI froze up was an http GET request for a PNG file. On a lark I then configured nod32 to stop trying to scan PNG files. Whereas before I did that the UI froze every few clicks, afterwards it took a lot more clicking around to get it to freeze. It still eventually did freeze though, so it suggests that there really is a problem in the http protection component of nod32 v7 that scans incoming datastreams.

For what its worth I found that clicking the parental control tab seems to cause the freeze more often than not. Perhaps the PNG file associated with that page is unique in some way that triggers the fault more reliably. No idea. I've sent the new traces to Marcos at ESET. I hope he has some time to look at it this week.
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bc