mustardquail
Occasional Visitor
Hello,
I've unfortunately been plagued by a very hard-to-troubleshoot issue with an RT-AC5300 router running AsusWRT Merlin.
My RT-AC5300 router will randomly experience network-wide severe latency/lag spikes. My wife and I run into this most often when we are both on the same Zoom call, from two computers accessing via 5GHz WiFi in different locations of the house. These lag spikes last ~10 or so seconds, but some are severe enough that we both completely drop off the call.
I've troubleshooted this by using gping during a few Zoom sessions to isolate where exactly the problem is happening. For example, I'll run three gping graphs to show output of ping across three different hosts: The router/AP, the ISP-provided modem (AT&T), and 9.9.9.9 for an IP address completely outside the network.
Each time I tested this across different Zoom call sessions, I was able to identify that the router was not responding to pings during these spikes (and therefore neither were any of the other hosts during this time), so I took that as evidence that the router may be where the problem exists. Once I'd established that logic, I performed a full wipe of the router and minimal setting rebuild (security settings reconfigured, etc). However, we're still running into these horrible lag spikes.
One of the many fixes I've tried is scheduling reboots. I scheduled them for around 4am daily, but the last couple days I've noticed my network is completely down and my router is showing a red light. I couldn't even connect to the network from my phone while it showed this issue. It starts working if I hard-restart it from pressing the button at the back of the router, so I've disabled scheduled reboots today to fix that issue.
Before I wiped my router settings, I had QoS enabled to prioritize this sort of traffic (in hopes of fixing the issue), but it still happened. Now, after the wipe/rebuild, I don't have QoS enabled, and it happens regardless. Sometimes even getting my phone out to look something up or download an app update, it feels like things slow down and I break the network or something. Or, if we're watching something through our streaming box (hard-wired) and I begin a download on my laptop, we'll see the stream freeze to catch up/buffer or it decreases in quality. I really thought the beefy specs with this router wouldn't be thrown off by seemingly one device.
I'm not really sure what to check next. I'm close to giving up and looking for a new router, but I'd initially spent so much on this 5300 router for it to be a reliable, solid investment in the network infrastructure for many years to come. I installed AsusWRT Merlin firmware to hopefully fix this as well, but it still seems like the issues persist unfortunately.
I've unfortunately been plagued by a very hard-to-troubleshoot issue with an RT-AC5300 router running AsusWRT Merlin.
My RT-AC5300 router will randomly experience network-wide severe latency/lag spikes. My wife and I run into this most often when we are both on the same Zoom call, from two computers accessing via 5GHz WiFi in different locations of the house. These lag spikes last ~10 or so seconds, but some are severe enough that we both completely drop off the call.
I've troubleshooted this by using gping during a few Zoom sessions to isolate where exactly the problem is happening. For example, I'll run three gping graphs to show output of ping across three different hosts: The router/AP, the ISP-provided modem (AT&T), and 9.9.9.9 for an IP address completely outside the network.
Each time I tested this across different Zoom call sessions, I was able to identify that the router was not responding to pings during these spikes (and therefore neither were any of the other hosts during this time), so I took that as evidence that the router may be where the problem exists. Once I'd established that logic, I performed a full wipe of the router and minimal setting rebuild (security settings reconfigured, etc). However, we're still running into these horrible lag spikes.
One of the many fixes I've tried is scheduling reboots. I scheduled them for around 4am daily, but the last couple days I've noticed my network is completely down and my router is showing a red light. I couldn't even connect to the network from my phone while it showed this issue. It starts working if I hard-restart it from pressing the button at the back of the router, so I've disabled scheduled reboots today to fix that issue.
Before I wiped my router settings, I had QoS enabled to prioritize this sort of traffic (in hopes of fixing the issue), but it still happened. Now, after the wipe/rebuild, I don't have QoS enabled, and it happens regardless. Sometimes even getting my phone out to look something up or download an app update, it feels like things slow down and I break the network or something. Or, if we're watching something through our streaming box (hard-wired) and I begin a download on my laptop, we'll see the stream freeze to catch up/buffer or it decreases in quality. I really thought the beefy specs with this router wouldn't be thrown off by seemingly one device.
I'm not really sure what to check next. I'm close to giving up and looking for a new router, but I'd initially spent so much on this 5300 router for it to be a reliable, solid investment in the network infrastructure for many years to come. I installed AsusWRT Merlin firmware to hopefully fix this as well, but it still seems like the issues persist unfortunately.
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