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Solved Need help establishing direct connection between pc & NAS bypassing router

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whitestar999

Occasional Visitor
I am facing a strange issue while trying to play videos from my NAS on my PC(windows 10 21H1). If my PC is running torrents which usually download/upload at around 5-10MB/s & I start playing a high bit rate video from my networked NAS drive & seek forward or backward quickly in the video the entire network connection hangs with zero network usage. After around 2-3 minutes the connectivity/playback resumes & will work fine if I let it play just like that & don't seek forward/backward in video player. I was under the impression that local devices on network don't use NAT tables in router but this issue seems to be because of that only. I have done some tests & even file copying works fine in same scenario(from same networked drive) even if torrents are running in my pc but only video playback cause this issue. I have tried with different video players & even a different laptop with windows 8.1 installed & only factor is as long as torrents are not running on client pc playing videos from networked drive everything works fine(incl quick forward backward seeking).

If somehow it is NAT tables causing issue because of high transfer rate(during quick seeking I have noticed network transfer speed jumping to 60-65MB/s) then is it possible to create a direct network path between my pc & NAS bypassing router in between despite both connected to it. My network setup is as below:

Primary gigabit D-link router-->connected via wds/wireless bridge using 5GHz band-->secondary gigabit Tplink router-->connected via ethernet-->PC & NAS

DHCP is done via primary router while PC & NAS both have static IPv4 address outside of the range of primary router DHCP server.
 
This is a Windows networking "feature" and nothing to do with the router or any "NAT tables". It is caused because the torrent client is creating dozens, if not hundreds of network connections which is swamping the connections to the NAS. And, Windows being Windows, when the consumption of the PC's network resources get to a certain point the whole machine grinds to a halt.
 
@ColinTaylor Found out this issue is not limited to video playback, turned out when I stop all torrents & just uploading a 7gb file to google drive & directly connected to primary dlink router via 5g usb wifi adapter I still face similar issue where upload speed continuously varies from 220mbps to 0 in windows task manager performance tab stats.
 

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If you're seeing this variable speed uploading to google or other sites when the torrents are not running this would imply it has nothing to do with the torrents. It sounds like you have two different problems.
 
If you're seeing this variable speed uploading to google or other sites when the torrents are not running this would imply it has nothing to do with the torrents. It sounds like you have two different problems.
Yes it has nothing to do with the torrents it seems but the primary dlink router itself. I am not sure what can be the reason that it can sustain 70MB/s of transfer speeds between two devices over ethernet connected to secondary router(see my network setup in my first post above) but can't handle the same when torrents are running or simply downloading/uploading files via web browser when directly connected to pc via 5GHz usb wifi adapter(no secondary router in between). As per hardware specifications it has 128mb ram & a dual core mediatek ~800MHz processor which I thought should be able to handle such stuff.
 
sounds like you are only going across the switch for one and through the routing function on the other case. Switches usually maintain wire speed and don't involve the router CPU.

throw in wifi chip, likely using the CPU to get to the switch and you add more variability ( wireless interference, other tasks on both PC and wifi router for example) . Once you start sending packets to the internet.......
 
sounds like you are only going across the switch for one and through the routing function on the other case. Switches usually maintain wire speed and don't involve the router CPU.

throw in wifi chip, likely using the CPU to get to the switch and you add more variability ( wireless interference, other tasks on both PC and wifi router for example) . Once you start sending packets to the internet.......
So I tested by directly connecting my pc to primary dlink router via ethernet & even then I get similar result of "speed drop spikes" every few second. This is what the transfer speed looks like while uploading a 4gb file with max(& expected) speed of around 220mbps(see attached file). Is this normal or does this mean my dlink router simply cannot handle 100mbps+ speeds despite being a gigabit router with 128mb ram & ~800MHz dual core mediatek processor in which case is it the hardware or the software which is the reason behind such poor performance.
 

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what are you using to test ?
Suggest iperf.
Real world tests, using browser to upload large size files to google drive/onedrive & copying large size file from pc to neworked drive on NAS where I am getting expected 75MB/s speeds but as per my setup & your comment this is bypassing primary router as both pc & nas connected via ethernet to secondary router.
 
If you use the various speed test web sites do you get the same spiking effect during the upload test? What about the download test?

BTW you never mentioned which model of d-link router your have but from specs it sounds quite old and very low-spec by today's standards.
 
If you use the various speed test web sites do you get the same spiking effect during the upload test? What about the download test?

BTW you never mentioned which model of d-link router your have but from specs it sounds quite old and very low-spec by today's standards.
Speed tests are not big enough to show the spike effect, I get 220mbps upload & download speed consistently as the test finish within 2 minutes.

This is actually quite new model by D-link though mostly aimed for developing nations market so yes compared to the basic asus rt-ac66u standard here it is pretty low-spec but no choice unfortunately.
DIR-1260 AC1200 MU-MIMO Wi-Fi Gigabit Router | D-Link (dlink.com)
 
if you are trying to figure out bandwidth issues, suggest 1) eliminating local lan/PC issues with software that controls more of the lan environment on the two ends and 2) determine if the issue is the LAN-WAN connection or the WAN - Internet and beyond connections. iperf will help with #1.
 
if you are trying to figure out bandwidth issues, suggest 1) eliminating local lan/PC issues with software that controls more of the lan environment on the two ends and 2) determine if the issue is the LAN-WAN connection or the WAN - Internet and beyond connections. iperf will help with #1.
So I did more testing & these are the results:
1. PC connected to secondary router via ethernet running iperf in server mode & laptop connected to primary router via ethernet running iperf in client mode & able to achieve ~300mbps for a 4gb file transfer(using -n switch in iperf).
2. Laptop connected to primary router via ethernet was able to download 4gb file from google drive with speed more or less avg of around 200mbps.
3. PC connected to secondary router via ethernet trying to download same 4gb file from google drive face the issue of losing network connectivity for a few seconds in between.
4. PC connected to secondary router via ethernet running iperf in client mode & NAS connected to secondary router via ethernet running iperf in server mode able to achieve 650mbps easily.

All the above tests were done while torrents were running on PC. I think it is either primary router issue with its wifi network or something wrong with my PC win 10/network driver. I will update the network driver directly from realtek site instead of using windows update & see if it helps with scenario 3.
 
Update: Turned out it was ethernet driver which was causing the issue. At first I didn't thought of updating the driver as I assumed using win 10 21H1 on a ryzen setup the driver shouldn't be more than 2-3 years old but when I looked I found out windows was using a driver back from 2015! Installed the latest 2021 released driver from realtek site & the issue was gone.
@degrub
 

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