Deco M9 plus v2 network drops most UDP packets

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Deco M9 plus v2 network drops most UDP packets

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Deco M9 plus v2 network drops most UDP packets
Deco M9 plus v2 network drops most UDP packets
2020-04-25 15:20:39 - last edited 2020-04-25 21:07:10
Model: Deco M9 Plus  
Hardware Version: V2
Firmware Version: 1.2.11 Buld 20190926 Ref 55727

I have seven M9 plus Deco units and am experiencing constant packet losses for UDP in the mesh network. The main effect of this is that DNS resolution is extremely patchy. I've tried using the default DNS setting, setting the DNS servers in the master Deco to 8.8.8.8,1.1.1.1 and setting DNS servers on the individual connected computers.

 

I have tried using the setup in both Router and AP mode, and I have swapped out each Deco in turn to be the master. I have tested with both a ZTE mf286 4g router and a Huawei B315 4g router. Note that this has involved 7*2*2=28 test configurations. I have been thorough.

 

The losses seem to vary over time between 5% and 50% of UDP packets, getting worse and then better over a period of an hour or two. I wrote the following Python script to perform multiple nslookups to determine this:

 

import sys
import string
import os
import time
import timeit

with open("results.txt","w") as f:
    for a in range(97,123):
        for b in range(97,123):
            cmd = "nslookup " + (chr(a) + chr(b) + ".com")
            exec_time = timeit.timeit('os.system(cmd)', globals=globals(), number=1)
            f.write(cmd + "\t" + str(exec_time) + "\n")
            time.sleep(1)

 

TP Link - feel free to use this to reproduce the problem.

 

When the UDP loss is very high, sometimes TCP starts dropping too (verified by running ping 172.217.22.174 - that's google.com - in a second command terminal).

 

All the problems are immediately resolved if I switch my computer connection from the Deco mesh to, for example, my phone running as a hotspot.

 

Is this a known issue, and does anyone know how to resolve it?

 

 

Software Test Engineer
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Re:Deco M9 plus v2 network drops most UDP packets
2020-04-25 15:37:01

@kf106 I only have 3 Deco M9's but they have been very reliable - no noticiable packet loss or any problems with DNS - although mine are using Ethernet backhaul so perhaps more reliable between nodes?

-- Deco X50-POE user
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Re:Deco M9 plus v2 network drops most UDP packets
2020-06-02 14:13:13

Well, I resolved it. Sort of.

 

The Deco mesh had terrible performance with my ZTE MF286 4G modem. With my Huawei B315 I noticed the performance was better. Then I went through and reset each Deco several times, setting it up as the new master, and ran a bunch of performance tests. In the end there was one unit that seemed to perform best as master, and UDP packet losses are down to less than 0.1%.

 

So it's working well now, but I have no idea what the underlying problem was.

Software Test Engineer
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