Wireless slows down after a few hours

[rboisjoly]

Hi,

I was asked to create a new thread with this question. So here I go.

My brand new TP router (bought on this site & now with the 1.5.10 version) slows down to a crawl every few hours to a few days. After just a few hours, instead of my regular 30 MB/s downlink speed, I get maybe 1, sometimes between 2 and 5 at most. Uplink is also affected, although not as dramatically since it tops at 7.

Accessing the router config pages is terribly slow as well.

A restart of the router returns everything back to normal.

I'm not doing much other than monitoring devices (logging web access and searches) and using DHCP and NAT. I have one DMZ machine set up as well.
No QoS settings or any bandwidth shaping. Just a cache of the last 600 visited sites and searches.

Ideas? This is a big pain. Not sure what I can try to fix this. Is anyone seeing this? If not, is this the kind of issue a reinstallation could potentially fix?

[pbix]

I am assuming that you mean that Quotas and QoS are disabled when you say you "have no QoS settings". If they are not disabled then disable them.

There are several possible causes of the symptoms you mentioned. But a problem with Wifi performance could explain them all I suppose.

Is there competition for Wifi frequencies in your area? How many other access points do you see and what channels are they on?

Are you using the "N" channels? If so I suggest that you configure your Wifi for "G+B" (No N Channel) frequencies and see if that makes any difference.

I would also suggest that the next time you get into this mode to disable the Wifi on your computer and then connect your computer with an ethernet cable to your router and see if remains slow.

[rboisjoly]

Yes QoS and Quotas are off.

When this happens, wired and wireless slow down, as all my devices are connected to the same router.

I can try checking for interference, as there is a number of networks around, but my Router is set to N+B+G compatible mode already.

It is set on channel 4 and not using wide bands.

My Airport Express (N) did not have the same issue, but I might reinstall it to test just in case.

Rebooting the Router fixes things immediately, which leads me to believe something is accumulating and slowing down things.

Perhaps the cache of searches and sites is becoming too large and slows down things?

I will turn off web usage monitor for a few days and see if this fixes the issue.

Next time it happens, I'll also double-check the wired connexion as well as any potential interference from neighbourhood wifi networks (how can this temporarily slow down my AP?)

[pbix]

If both wired and wireless slow down then it is not a wIfi issue so you do not need to worry about N vs. G or interfering channels.

Rebooting your router causes it to reinitialize with your ISP. That could mean it gets a new IP address or otherwise signal your ISP such that your connection is allowed to operate again at full speed. So the fact that your rebooted your router is not really proof that it was your router that was at fault.

I do not know of any way that your router can "slow down" its connection with your ISP on its own. You could check the CPU utilization on your router to see if its saturated but I just doubt that is the issue.

If you have a DSL modem check the line speed that your modem has at the time. Line speed can vary based on conditions determined by your modem. Line speed can usually be observed on the modems web page.

Next time instead of rebooting try doing an "ifwan down" and "ifwan up" from your router's command line and see if that has any affect. Not sure what that would tell us but it would be interesting.

[rboisjoly]

Hi again

Thanks for your replies

Ok, happened again. Read your message after so I was not able to run the command you suggested. I'll try next time.

This time I checked and the wired side of things does NOT slow down. My mistake. my iMac is connected directly at 1000 and it got full performance.

This leaves potential interference... but what could cause interference and go away when I reboot?

When I check my wifi signal, I can see the transmission speed between my MacBook Pro and the router was at 5 and is currently at 130 after a reboot, where speedtest.net resumed with proper speeds (30 MB down, 10 up) as opposed to a.5 up and 6 down (this varies).

I'm not sure what to check or change. I'll try another channel perhaps and see if this works. The router is set to reboot every night at 5 am. I stopped monitoring sites and that did not help.

I've had issues with Skype which was very slow of course and I use this for work, and I have to tell people I have to reset my network all the time. Not really the best situation. I'd really like to find a solution to this.

[pbix]

Problems with Wifi slowdowns have been reported especially with v1.5.9. This issue is best researched and reported over at openwrt.org. Gargoyle uses that software for this function.

What I can say is that if you change your Wifi to "G+B" as I previously suggested that you may find things become more stable for you.

If you do that please report your results here for other users to reference.

[rboisjoly]

Ok, I'll try that, but slowing down my wifi is not a great solution as I do use connections between my internal server for backups and this will be slowed down. Still it might serve as a diagnostic tool thanks for the suggestion.

I am running 1.5.10

[rboisjoly]

Hi again. Have not tested with G finally, as I have things to do which require some transfers internally and I wanted to make this quick. I'll try later perhaps.

But in any case, this is getting too much work for the time I have. So I'll turn off this router until someone else figures it out or an update comes out which at least attempts to fix this.

I'll just plug back my Airport Extreme, which although it doesn't give me the control I need, at least, works all the time.

I've visited the OpenWRT forums and there are tons of discussions on issues and some ideas of solutions, but I'd rather spend my time working on my projects than troubleshooting these things.

Too bad, I spent some money on a router with Gargoyle pre-installed in order to save some aggravation and it has not worked out really well I must say. Not since the newest version.

Good luck with all this.

[vdnick]

Hi,

I have the same problem with TP-Link WDR3600 and Gargoyle v 1.6.0. Wireless link speed drop from 150 to 135, 120, 90 Mbps and less.

[TCattd]

I'm suffering the same, everyday; every morning i wake up and wifi speed its slowed down.
Just a reboot of the router make wifi go to normal again.

And, schedule reboot doesn't work for me at least. I set up one reboot at 6am, but, wifi speed keeps the same, slow, after that programmed auto reboot.

No idea what is happening.
Really annoying.

TP-Link TL-WR1043N/ND v1
Gargoyle 1.6.0 (and lastest official 1.5.x too, same problem)

For those looking for some info about this at openwrt, reference:
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=37630
https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/9654
https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14767