This is not how you find a high quality product on Amazon.
>It didn’t resolve the issue. It did, however, come with an offer for a free 64GB flash drive in exchange for a good reviews.
Now you know why it was so highly reviewed.
I’m relatively certain that was indeed what the author meant to imply.
Problem is if I try to buy something on AMZN I need to sift through large numbers of junk product listings, a problem I don't have with best buy, petsmart, adorama, or other reputable online retailers. Even the marketplaces like Ebay, Etsy and Temu seem less offensive to me. Result = I canceled my Prime subscription and now AMZN is the last place I will go to buy something and not the first.
Next time I see such an offer in an item I order I will definitely report it. Maybe it will improve the online shopping landscape by an epsilon if we all do it.
They try to hide it from the front page (a bit of a dark pattern) but you don't need to download the plugin to use it, just visit https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer
javascript:void(open('https://www.fakespot.com/analyze?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)))Should report all such new cases you see to https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
ftc press release: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...
Click on the leftmost icon in the URL bar, select Show Reader, then click on Summarize.
I'll concede on the joylessness front. However, I assure you that all the posts on my personal blog are 100% artisanal human-made joyless posts! No AI needed.
i.e. Unusual vs unusual
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://blog.ando.fyi/posts/diagnosing-an-unsual-wifi-issue/
I wrote this in 2020 apparently:
https://github.com/Andoryuuta/website/blob/b95a693c745688995...
I’ll have to do some digging to find out, but curious if anyone else has seen this on Qt.
I noticed that my WiFi had similar repeating lags .. about every 8-10s pings would go to a few hundred ms and then return to single/low double digits.
Long story short, the problem was with several MacOS components (and maybe some 3rd party software) requesting Location services to determine Mac’s position. To do that, among other things, Mac scans WiFi around you (probably for the names/SSID?) and to do that, the current WIFI connection is temporarily put on a back burner, resulting in a brief delay in traffic. The solution was to minimize location services.
I can't believe they ever thought that'd be a good idea.
See also desktop notifications for websites
You install an application you are giving it permission to do practically anything it wants to do with your system, including find the location as often as it wants to.
Browsers have to ask you permission to show desktop notifications, or get your location, or anything else.
Not on macOS, AFAIK. You can add/remove permissions for that.
I pin the system disruption from this query squarely on the OS. It should make such determinations in the background and return whatever value it has, without starting up a new scan just for this query.
1. Google/Nest WiFi mesh APs being "too close" to each other (30 ft / 10 m), causing a periodic backhaul mesh collapse. There was no user-visible indication of this, it was completely locked away and only noticed by support. I ditched Google's junk and moved to Ubiquiti.
2. On macOS, ObjectiveSee's LuLu has nondeterministic packet loss that causes SSH connection resets and a whole host of other weird problems. It's totally untrustworthy and shouldn't be used by anyone until it's proven reliable.
Scanning for nearby WiFi access points with excessive frequency might be a dumb idea for other reasons (e.g. power consumption) but it should *not* interrupt the functionality of the current network connection.
If it does, that's a massive failure of the network card's firmware and/or OS drivers for it.
My guess would be that the card is changing frequencies/bands to scan other channels, and is slow to switch back to the channel of the currently-associated AP, or doesn't properly buffer network packets while doing so.
Under Linux, I don't think I've ever seen a case where WiFi scans appreciably affected a normal infrastructure-mode WiFi connection (whether from NetworkManager or triggered manually via `iw` etc).
So much for Apple's vaunted hardware/software integration
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/3xipom/how_to...
Right. I suppose I've been both lucky, as well as intentional in seeking out hardware with high-quality drivers when it was very important.
I'm just surprised that *Macs* have this issue, given that one of the alleged selling points for Mac is that it runs on a very limited set of hardware which is supposed to enable careful OS/hardware integration and testing.
Scanning works by tuning the radio to listen for a beacon sent by the AP every ~100ms on every channel (there are 11 2.4 GHz and ~22 5 GHz channels in the US). Since you're not transmitting, it should be low-power, but you have to tune the radio to each channel, so you can't communicate with your AP.
Yes, but good drivers can mitigate the latency hit by not scanning all the channels at once. https://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2016/05/16/networkmanager-and-w....
> Since you're not transmitting, it should be low-power,
Depending on the hardware/firmware quality, tuning to each channel can use a lot of energy. As for "not transmitting," this is true for passive scanning (generally preferable) but not for active scanning.
> but you have to tune the radio to each channel, so you can't communicate with your AP.
Right, but _if the OS and drivers are written properly_ (on both the client device as well as the AP ) they'll buffer unsent packets… the high latency during the channel changes is unavoidable, but the dropped packets and broken TCP streams are NOT.
> With a good driver scanning takes only a few seconds
A few seconds of not transmitting or receiving packets. This is in line with people having sudden several hundred millisecond ping spikes.
A few seconds of no real traffic is absolutely noticeable impact for constant, latency sensitive traffic.
You omitted the immediately following text: "*and the driver breaks the scan into chunks*, returning to the associated access point’s channel periodically to handle pending traffic."
A good driver will return to the AP's channel _during the scan_ so that there is never more than (say) 100 ms of latency even while the scan is ongoing.
You will discover all sorts of disruptions affecting your network quality, including interference.
For your primary devices like desktops & laptops, use mtr (my-traceroute) in a terminal window to watch your pings over time.
Your connectivity issues , particularly with VC, terminal emulation & gaming, are due to ping latency , not bandwidth issues.
You will find software issues like this one, the location services bug on MacOS, and others; as well as hardware issues due to transmission interference, noise, physical interference.
Consistent & low pings are critical.
Putting as much as you can on wired ethernet helps a lot. Still have just as much bogus traffic, but on 1g (or even 100m), there's a lot more room for it.
Everyonce in a while, I look at the broadcast traffic on my wifi and cry.
MTR is a good start, and easy to run on a chron job. Graph the results with excel
For some it's not possible, but in my personal experience a lot of people who "can't" wire really just don't want to wire.
Even if you can't do a full "professional grade" install there are almost always viable options unless you live in an apartment built like a prison.
I have in the past:
* Poked tiny easily-patched holes in the wall just large enough to pass a bare cable through to an adjacent room
* Tuck cables under baseboard molding
* Run cables through vents
* Followed existing television/telco wiring
* (last resort) Just stapled the cable to the wall/ceiling, optionally covering with stick-on covers.
Most of those options can be hidden from view and all are trivially removable/repairable so there's no issue in a rental situation.
Almost everyone can do most if not all of those things if they want to, they just usually don't want to because they've been trained to not like wires, that wireless is better.
I have actually had a person complain about lag on their game console, which was in the shelves under their TV connected via WiFi to their cable modem which was in the same shelves, and they didn't want me to plug in a simple six foot cable between the two because they didn't want more wires. That's just pure stupid.
If it doesn't move, it should be wired unless there is absolutely no practical way to wire it. Desktop computers, game consoles, TVs, etc. Even laptops, if you're working from home and sitting at a desk, have a cable there. Modern laptops with USB-C docking stations make it easier than it's ever been, the same cord that provides power also provides reliable high speed networking.
It's all about tradeoffs. My efforts spent on running great wifi have paid off.
Best case, yeah WiFi isn't substantially worse than wired, especially if all you care about is getting to the internet. Worst case, it's a fuckton worse. A wired network will never drop out for seconds at a time because something ran a scan (as noted in multiple places in this thread). A wired network doesn't give a shit about your microwave. A wired network doesn't have meaningful interference issues.
The more active users you have on your network, the worse WiFi is going to be, where a wired network can take more users than you can fit in a residential environment.
It's not technically impossible, but it's so unlikely as to be the sort of thing the marketers who like to use terms like "AC3200" would be embarrassed to claim.
Your data also shows multiple consecutive samples where at least one of those 20 pings were entirely lost. On a wired LAN at home scale any sort of packet loss would be indicative of something being very wrong.
https://i.imgur.com/mYkfKQF.png
A couple of milliseconds of extra latency doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent, but packet loss always matters.
Check back with me in a couple of months if you think it'll matter, but I'd be willing to bet lunch that the data won't be substantially different.
What I've been trying to communicate is that with adequate attention to the wifi hardware and configuration you can achieve excellent results that are adequate for VC & gaming .
that's it. Wifi will never reach wired ethernet performance on the junk bands that it is forced to operate on.
Otherwise, I strongly agree with everything said above, wired networking is worth the investment.
I've only done that particular trick in an apartment that had through-wall vents above the bedroom doors so it was literally four inches the cable was inside the vent.
My favorites are APs/range extenders/meshes that don't do multicast properly (mDNS in particular, breaking lots of LAN-based apps), and also ones that seem to semi-randomly isolate devices (i.e., prevent devices connected to the AP from reaching devices that are not connected to it, except the gateway).
There are a huge number of these devices (I'm looking at you, Netgear). Sometimes ICMP will work, but not TCP. It's nightmarish to debug, because it often seems to be some table-size issue in the AP, so devices will work for a while, and then some new device connects and the old ones break.
It all just worked.
Their licensing got really goofy for a while, and yocto (which unfortunately I became a “SME” of at work) made cloning and using anything after 5.15.2 very obnoxious. They needed to figure out how to pull a RedHat and get paid support, but this was right around the time electron (at least for a while) rendered native apps as second-class citizens.
The bindings to other languages are neat, and the signal/slot idea is also neat. The whole moc part isn’t great, but I understand why, and it has very rarely caused me any real issues.
All my other devices, including a MacBook and iPad connected to the same network work fine. My previous iPhone also worked just fine, it's just the new phone.
I know how annoying these can become, and glad to hear that you could pinpoint it down.
Around 2017 I moved into a new house and my MacBook Pro started getting latency spikes every few minutes. Not as bad, but still noticeable. This irked me quite a bit, because I spent several weeks wiring my house with the best POE-powered WiFi access points available at that time.
So I spent some time debugging the issue, and it turned out that the culprit was in the location services! For some reason, the weather widget tried to check the location every few minutes, and that involved scanning for the WiFi access points. Which in turn meant that latency spike, I posted about it on StackOverflow ( https://superuser.com/questions/1142798/experiencing-high-la... ).
It smells like there is a AP search occurring, which I think usually causes the antenna to frequency hop for the duration search, which results in latency on the established connection since it can't transmit at the same time.
But does enumerating registry keys do that? I didn't think the registry had dynamic behavior like that.
Still … a ridiculous bug.
But I might be missing something.
Nothing to be done about it other than "don't do that" or "replace AP" since the firmware is a black box. It was...maddening.
Bluetooth is pretty low power, but without the TV in the way, that range should be no problem at all. Problem is that a lot can block it physically and drown it out in RF noise.
Most TV's probably have a thin, but solid aluminum plate in them for structure that could indeed block BLE and be causing the issue. Ironically, this is one RF case where metal studs would actually be helpful.
For comparison, I fly a paramotor and use Sena Bluetooth mesh for comms, and just our heads at any distance are enough to block it if we're on the wrong side of each other. Motorcyclists on the other hand don't often have this issue since there's other vehicles and stuff to bounce their signals around.
What might help if that's the issue is something reflective like foil mounted somewhere that can see both the controller and the GTV device. I'd also try to make the reflector slightly/roughly parabolic-ish (kinda shallow as to not make aiming difficult) pointed at the GTV device. You can hide the reflector behind and/or point it through anything RF transparent like wood or plastic.
Another possibility is other 2.4ghz noise— You could try turning down 2.4ghz transmit power on your AP as a possible quick fix. Of course if you haven't, make sure anything that can be on 5ghz, is.
Edit: Note that a reflector will also reflect noise sources at the GTV device.
I've also had issues with poorly shielded HDMI interfering with 2.4ghz in close proximity, so even just jostling things around behind the TV a little or using your best shielded HDMI cables there could help some.
Debugging RF can be tricky and frustrating, but I hope one of these tips helps either you or maybe a passer-by one day. :)
Happy new year!
This pretty clearly points to some weird software you’ve got installed. It’s not hardware, and it’s not a wonky Windows installation. What else could it be?
"If scanning for wifi has that much negative impact on my connection, the OS should by default pop up a toast notification when it happens without a user request to do so."
If MS can put slop like news and weather and ads for apps like Candy Crush into the Windows GUI, they can also give me useful info like that.
All the other devices don't have any problems.
Obviously that was all the incentive I needed to finally heed my devops friend's warning and disable port forwarding and instead use Tailscale for remote access, but yeesh. Wild to watch happen first-hand.
