Intermittent High Ping Spikes
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Hello all,
I have been having issues recently with my Deco M9 Plus and I'm not sure how to fix it. The basic issue is that I am getting high speeds when testing and general use, but when gaming, especially League of Legends, I get high ping spikes randomly every few minutes or so. This is making my gaming unplayable. I've put my PC on high priority but that doesn't help.
I've narrowed down the issue to the wireless connection. I plugged in directly to the router with no issue, and also tried using a TP Link Powerline adapter with no issue (although much slower speeds on this). The Deco is one floor below me, literally directly below. Signal is strong and again, I have good speeds when running tests. Also of note, I am only using ONE Deco M9 unit as I have the other 2 in another home. This house is small enough where only 1 is necessary for good signals.
PLEASE HELP! My old, larger home, did not have this issue with just 1 Deco unit. I'm stumped. There must be some kind of throttling or setting that is hindering me. I also have a TP Link Archer T9E PCI wireless card, but I also tried other wireless cards with the same problem.
PS. Called TP Link the other day, was waiting on speaker hold for 3 hours for a single representative, and then your line hung up on me. That's ridiculous.
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I currently am testing all of this on only one node. I have the other 2 nodes at a different home. This is the current situation:
- Connected to Deco via wifi = high pings
- Connected to Deco via ethernet = low pings
- Connected to other wireless router via wifi = low pings
I'm not sure how this can be anything other than the wireless radio in the Deco causing the problem.
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Look at the ping times you provided through the testing though.
Wireless did have a maximum of 808ms, i know that is high, but the average was only 97ms. When contected via ethernet the pings were the maximum was 84ms and the average was 68ms This means that there was only a 29ms on average difference between wired and wireless, That is not much of a difference. That tells me that there are a few possibliites for the spikes. 1. Yahoo had a lot of traffic at that time causing the response to spike. 2. There was a increase in network traffic during the test. If the averages on the ping test were spaced out further I could see there being an issue with the Node but in this case at this time I don't see it. 3. What band were you conntected to at the time of the test? For instance if you were on the 2.4GHz band and say a micorwave was turned on that could create interference and cause response spikes.
You said you are having issues when Gaming. Is it PC-based or Console-based? Is there a specific game? Have you tried a diffrent game to see if you have similar results. Are you using any 3rd party chat services or streaming while gaming?
Even if we do a precautionary RMA we have to make sure we are sure the product is defective or preceived defective and with the infromation we currently have I can not say that it is.
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Hi Carl, from the beginning my issue has never been a continuous, high ping experience. The issue is just that I get intermittent high ping which disrupts online games. This happens in all online games that I've tried, albeit there are only 3.
The high ping is not a one off occurance when running these ping tests to suggest that it is one of your listed issues. Every wireless ping test showed random pings of over 500ms+, and happens across Yahoo as well as my games. I could try other sites as well later tonight and I expect to see the same issues.
I don't know what specific band I am connected to as I just let it on auto, but I will attempt to disable each band separately and test it out that way as well. Again, these high ping spikes are not isolated. There is no chance that it is because of a microwave or any other kind of interference. I even completely reformatted my PC and only installed League of Legends, only to still feel the ping spikes.
If an RMA is too difficult to start please let me know and I will just exchange this unit at Costco. I originally came to these forums hoping there was some kind of setting that I was missing that we could troubleshoot, not necessarily to start an RMA.
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When doing the ping test the average ping is the one we really need to watch. This is because it tells us if there is a consitant issue while running that ping. Average ping times espically when gaming that are below 100ms are considered to be common and should not interupt the gaming experiance. The reason I asked to have the ping test run was to see the average pings being generated. I was not fully clear in that regard so I do appologize if I made any confusions due to that. One feature we can look at, espically since you only have one node is turn off Fast Roam. As your devices are not going to be roaming this is a unneeded feature anyways. This has been know to cause a few issues with connectivity, mainly to stationary devices and or devices that have older cards that are not compatible with Fast Roam. An RMA is not out of the question but as RMAs can only cover a manufature defect we have to be al the very least reasonably sure the unit is the cause.
Also let me ask you this when you were doing your pings were you loading the packets? i.e. 100 packet test 500 byte packets?
Thank you
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I know I might be a little late to the party. But I managed to solve this same problem on my PC by turning off the mesh wifi for the specific device experiencing the latency. It seemed that this jump of latency occured (at least for me) whenever my device switched to a different Deco (which it did often since it had similiar connection strengths to 2 different Deco's). This has solved my problem and I now get consistent ping.
Top is before change, bottom is for after change:
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@Elcap Inside the Deco app there is an option to turn off Mesh Technology. Do this for the device affected.
Click on the device from the list. Click the cog on the upper right to access settings, then turn off mesh technology.
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@Ashhong - I have had the same problem and I have swapped from AP mode to router mode and tried all combinations of this and that. But still see either request timeouts or ping spikes. Following this chat I have disabled the MESH on the devices and this had led to a more stable ping and little to no request timeouts.
But it must be time for Deco to fix this. I am on firmware 1.4.4 and have this problem. Is the MESH not one of the major selling points for such devices. Hopefully Deco / TP-Link fix this soon.
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For stationary devices mesh wifi is not really that important. Essentially the Deco is a range extender for these devices as they should always be connected to the same Deco. Mesh wifi becomes useful when the device is moving around. Maintaining a strong signal and fast speeds is great! Most of the time the devices that will be switching often are streaming media or browsing the web. The occasional latency spike for this use case is fine as the buffer will smooth everything out or a page will take a bit longer to load. In other words, this issue won't be noticed by most unless they are doing something like gaming that requires a consistent low latency connection.
In my opinion, Tp-Link should've built something into the logic for determining whether a switch is required that accounts for the latency accrued in the actual switch. Therefore eliminating switches that would only yield slight improvements. However, I don't feel like this issue is a game breaker since most people won't notice and those devices that need to be forced on a single Deco would gain little to no benefit for switching devices.
Note: When I say Mesh Wifi, I mean the ability to switch devices to maintain a strong signal. Not sure my terminology is correct.
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