RBR50 performance degradation after 2.5.0.38 firmware update

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Orbi-Roc wrote:

The demand placed on a network can also have a drastic impact on speed. From your observations, you were able to tell if the speed deterioration is constant or sporadic (perhaps in tandem with the data demands placed on the network or the number of data-hungry devices connected to it.)

Yeah, that was one of the things that pointed the finger firmly at the 2.5.0.38 firmware while I was investigating the problem.  

Most of the client devices that connect to my home network don't have an idle/suspend mode that keeps them connected while "off".  The only devices that remain connected when not actively being used are a pair of Chromecast Ultra streaming pods, an infrared camera that monitors one of my pets, and a pair of cell phones.  Even combined, the idle-time load of those five devices hasn't historically reached the level of being able to impact a speed test at all.  When I first noticed the issue, I'd initially suspected it was my cable internet service being flaky and had disconnected everything so I could do a clean reboot of the cable modem and router.  Only one device was connected after bringing everything back up, and when that invoked the in-router speed test and got normal results followed by running an on-device test and getting over a 100Mbps deficit.  Repeated that same set of tests from every PC and mobile device able to run a speed test one at a time ruled out the idea that it was a particular device, and with only one device on the network at a time it ruled out the idea that it was a loading issue on the network caused by other devices or something related to a particular type of connection.  After my ISP sent service personnel to check my modem and line and they confirmed everything was functioning normally there, that the router's WAN speed test and devices connected north of the Orbi were seeing my full connection speed narrowed the field to something in the router's LAN or in the interface between the Orbi's WAN and LAN since only LAN clients on the Orbi were experiencing the slowdown and stability issues.

One of the moderators I contacted requested my contact info and provided it to the Orbi dev team.  I'm still waiting to hear from them, but hopefully they can get some good test data from my affected system to help develop a fix.

For now, I've worked around the issue for speed- and stability-sensitive clients (mostly my gaming PC) by swapping the modem back to router mode and connecting to it while the less sensitive clients continue to connect through the Orbi while it's a client on the modem's DHCP.

I've got a suspicion that the bizarre uniformness of the slowdown and the issues being mostly localized to Rx comms may be a result of the compatbility fixes made in 2.5.0.38 for certain manufacturers causing issues with antispoofing or another security feature.