Wi-Fi stutters every evening like clockwork

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa What on earth could cause a Wi-Fi setup to momentarily fail each night at around the same time? Perhaps a rogue scheduled task
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abbodi86, woody

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Tracey Capen wrote:

LANGALIST By Fred Langa What on earth could cause a Wi-Fi setup to momentarily fail each night at around the same time? Perhaps a rogue scheduled task
[See the full post at: Wi-Fi stutters every evening like clockwork]

Something else to check would be if the router or access point is scheduled to reboot automatically.

GaryK

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RTEsysadmin

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If streaming is being interrupted, it could be the ISP forcing its modem to get a different IP address – in an effort to prevent customers from successfully running “servers” on a residential internet connection.  Comcast did this and I suspect that many other ISPs do as well.  Depending on the ISP, it might be possible to shift the IP reset to a more convenient time of day.

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gkarasik wrote:

Something else to check would be if the router or access point is scheduled to reboot automatically.

I suspect a router or access point reboot would take more than a couple of seconds… more like a couple of minutes given the time their self-tests take.

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So, it happens regularly at around 8.30 pm and only lasts for a couple of seconds.

How about using Sysinternals/TechNet’s Process Monitor (ProcMon) which captures OS activity and records the events to fractions of a second.

The only problem with ProcMon is that it captures so much info that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. What’s needed is a way of quickly zooming in on only the few seconds that the Wi-Fi service stutters.

One method is to configure a continual ‘pinger’ pointing at the router.

Try this:

1. Open a  command prompt window and enter ipconfig. Looking down through the results will show you the name of your Wi-Fi adapter and, underneath, the IP address for the Default Gateway. For example:

2. Copy and paste the following into the command prompt window, changing the IP address (shown in red below) to that of the IP address of *your* Default Gateway, i.e. your wireless router.

ping -t 10.20.24.1|find /v ""|cmd /q /v:on /c "for /l %a in (0) do (set "data="&set /p "data="&if defined data echo(!time! !data!)"

3. Press the ENTER key at just before 8.30 pm and watch the results. At some point the continual ping will fail then, several seconds later, start working again. You now have a Wi-Fi network monitor with a precise timestamp showing you exactly when Wi-Fi drops and starts again to a fraction of a second.

Press CTRL+C to stop the ‘pinger’.

4. Repeat this next evening but this time, just before 8.30 pm, *right*-click on Procmon.exe and choose Run as administrator as well. (The first time it’s run you have to accept a EULA. This only happens the once.) ProcMon will begin capturing data hundreds of times a second. You can stop and start captures using an icon in the toolbar or using CTRL+E (with CTRL+X to clear the capture window).

5. As soon as your commandline ‘pinger’ shows Wi-Fi has returned, stop the ‘pinger’ and stop ProcMon‘s capturing (using CTRL+E). Using the precise timestamp from the commandline ‘pinger’ you should now be able to use the first column in ProcMon to pinpoint what happens in the OS for those few seconds of Wi-Fi stutter.

Tip: To reduce the amount of network activity that ProcMon records, consider closing any network-related activity beforehand, e.g. browsers, streaming video, etc. You want to see what Wi-Fi itself is doing, not what apps using Wi-Fi are doing.

Tip: To quickly reduce the *huge* amount of captured data, use ProcMon‘s *right*-click commands to ‘Exclude Events Before’ and ‘Exclude Events After’.

Post back if you need help interpreting results. ProcMon is great… but has a learning curve.

Hope this helps…

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abbodi86, satrow

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What’s failing, the wireless device in Windows, or the wireless connection?

The latter could be caused by the lease time set for 24 hours in the router and the lease reset is a bit ‘fluffy’.

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It sounds like the lease time in the router’s settings is set to 24 hours. Thus each connected computer’s lease gets renewed every day at approximately the same time?

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What in the environment (house, garage, neighbors, street lights?, some IoT device) regularly changes state at this time?
Some years ago a church’s intrusion alarm started tripping consistently in the early-morning hours. I asked: What is happening at that time? Answer: The lawn sprinklers. Solution: Repair folk found ‘a bad ground’. That was electrical, not Wi-Fi; but the sleuthing is parallel.

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off topic but maybe interesting concerning intermittent outages:

Years ago I was part of a company that provided remote control systems (SCADA is the acronym) to electric utilities.  One of our customers reported having loss of communication issues with a remote terminal that happened approximately the same times twice a day, morning and evening, but not on weekends.  That should have been the clue but we spent days looking for the issue.  It wasn’t until a technician noted a school bus on a distant hill appeared right at the time of the signal loss.  It turned out the line of sight communication path was so close to the top of the hill that a school bus parking to pick up and drop off kids got in the way.

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