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R7000P very slow to serve internet, timeouts with just one real user -- solved?
I've got a Nighthawk in a pretty unusual configuration -- there's older Netgear wifi router and a mesh network station within a foot of the Nighthawk, and I'm using ReadyShare. I've been able to stabilize it so it will run as long as 6 weeks without rebooting itself, and most of the time its network throughput is fine.
Most of the time, there's only one system (windows) really using the router. If I have a lot of apps hitting the network with low demands (Firefox with a dozen tabs open, iTunes playing files that are on the Readyshare drive, Pidgin hitting 4 different IM networks, Thunderbird occasionally pinging a dozen mailboxes), the router seems to get confused and have reallybad throughput. Long interruptions while it is gazing at its navel, serving up only a couple of hundred packets at a time. Makes all the apps time out.
During these intervals, ping of 8.8.8.8 is hundreds of ms, half or more will timeout. But here's what's weird: it seems that if I ping 192.168.1.1 a couple of times during the blackout period, the ping times for 8.8.8.8 come back to 13 ms and all the network apps get happy. I've set up a ping script and the network is rock solid (has been for an hour).
Is this solved? Who knows. If you don't see any further posts from me on this thread, it did work. If it blows up after a while, I'll let you know.
Re: R7000P very slow to serve internet, timeouts with just one real user -- solved?
Ho boy, are you going to love this...
Discovered that there is some sort of weird interaction between iTunes and Firefox, when running at the same time doing almost nothing. Some sequence of packets on certain web pages evidently confounds the router and makes it lose track of reality. I have no specific evidence, but suspect this is the result of tracking code and scripts buried in places like Youtube, Facebook, and elsewhere.
Running iTunes 12.12.7.1 and Firefox 110 64 bit on Windows 10 pro. Symptoms are basically the same with WMM, Bearmforming, airtime fairness, or MU-MIMO enabled or disabled
If I have iTunes and Firefox doing nothing-burger activities (playing songs hosted on Netgear's Readyshare disk, sitting on Google's home page), everything runs fine for hours. But the moment I start using the browser for anything more interesting, I'll have maybe 10 minutes before the network dies. Once it's sickly, if I kill the browser, the router comes back to life all by itself after a minute or so. 100% repeatable, even with all of Facebook's plugins disabled.
If I do the same browsing routine with the Edge browser, I can go for hours with no problem.
Re: R7000P very slow to serve internet, timeouts with just one real user -- solved?
And the answer is....no.
Turns out there was an update to the Netgear firmware I wasn't aware of. I thought I had automatic updates enabled, because that's what the pull-down in the upper right of the Netgear admin page showed. But there's a wonderfully hidden setting in the advanced>administration>update page that disables auto updates.
Will the latest firmware solve it? Who knows. I'll keep you updated FWIW.
Re: R7000P very slow to serve internet, timeouts with just one real user -- solved?
Successfully updated firmware to V1.3.3.154_10.1.86
Ran fine for a few hours, but then had an incident with the same symptoms:
plenty of signal strength on both 2.4 and 5 GHz
downloads/file reads go really slow, many will stop
ping 192.168.1.1 responses are many hundreds of milliseconds, >50% of them time out entirely (normally, you'd expect these to be single-digit ms)
The netgear browser-based control panel may log you out
After maybe 2 minutes, things return to normal
When it's done, the setup>advanced home page statistics button claims that there hasn't been a reboot, but the browser became busy to the point that it wouldn't get around to basic networking.
Considering this model was sold as the high-performance gamer's delight, I'm really surprised how underpowered the processor seems to be (long boot times) and how un-multithreaded the software is (can't handle "normal" workloads and also respond to basic network functions).
Successfully updated firmware to V1.3.3.154_10.1.86
Ran fine for a few hours, but then had an incident with the same symptoms:
That raises another question that I should have asked earlier, what modem sits in front of the router. Make and model, not something like "ISP's cable modem".
Considering this model was sold as the high-performance gamer's delight....
Six years ago, when 500 Mbps was rare, and an exaggeration even then.
This was always a mid-range router. (The contemporaneous R7800 has a more powerful processor)
The R7000P was designed to accept things like Armor and paid-for Parental controls. (Turn off anything like that, as well as QoS and traffic metering.)
For gamers, a couple of years later Netgear created the XR range. That was, coincidentally, based on the R7800's chip technology.
Technology moves on. Your device is a couple of generations, or more, behind the bleeding edge.
Nothing wrong with that, I love my R7800 and my R7000P is fine for uses that don't strain the traffic on my slow connection. But eventually you may have to get something that suits Internet services in the 2020s.
Re: R7000P very slow to serve internet, timeouts with just one real user -- solved?
Ho boy, are you going to love this...
Discovered that there is some sort of weird interaction between iTunes and Firefox, when running at the same time doing almost nothing. Some sequence of packets on certain web pages evidently confounds the router and makes it lose track of reality. I have no specific evidence, but suspect this is the result of tracking code and scripts buried in places like Youtube, Facebook, and elsewhere.
Running iTunes 12.12.7.1 and Firefox 110 64 bit on Windows 10 pro. Symptoms are basically the same with WMM, Bearmforming, airtime fairness, or MU-MIMO enabled or disabled
If I have iTunes and Firefox doing nothing-burger activities (playing songs hosted on Netgear's Readyshare disk, sitting on Google's home page), everything runs fine for hours. But the moment I start using the browser for anything more interesting, I'll have maybe 10 minutes before the network dies. Once it's sickly, if I kill the browser, the router comes back to life all by itself after a minute or so. 100% repeatable, even with all of Facebook's plugins disabled.
If I do the same browsing routine with the Edge browser, I can go for hours with no problem.
