[HN Gopher] Diagnosing an Unusual WiFi Issue (2020)
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Diagnosing an Unusual WiFi Issue (2020)
Author : llimllib
Score : 149 points
Date : 2025-01-02 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ryuuta.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ryuuta.net)
| Johnny555 wrote:
| >First, I purchased a new, highly-reviewed, wifi adapter on
| Amazon.
|
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Now you know why it was so highly reviewed.
|
| I'm relatively certain that was indeed what the author meant to
| imply.
| generalizations wrote:
| Usually, you can see a few comments mentioning those offers
| when you check the reviews. Amazon lets you go see just the
| 1-star reviews; this is a good use for that feature.
| jchw wrote:
| It's interesting how it's actually really easy to notice
| this happening as a random consumer (I've seen it a few
| times, in fact) but somehow impossible for Amazon to do
| anything about, and presumably when they do they don't
| bother putting in much effort to properly punish sellers
| for it. It's almost like Amazon does not give a shit.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Part of my falling out with AMZN was when I saw a product
| listing that where somewhere between fraud and word
| salad, complained, and was told that AMZN doesn't care
| what I think about a product listing unless I bought the
| product.
|
| 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.
| dotBen wrote:
| Fakespot is not infallible but a useful addition to any
| Amazon research process.
|
| 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
| frereubu wrote:
| Yeah, I was really annoyed when it to me quite a while to
| find that URL after they changed the layout of the site.
| I only shop on Amazon when I absolutely have to, and have
| an extension just sitting there being regularly updated
| with who knows what code really didn't appeal.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Just go right to the tl;dr
| xattt wrote:
| Good advice for all product reviews and most articles too.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Anyone know of a browser extension that opens pages right to
| any detected tl;dr headings?
| reaperducer wrote:
| If you have Safari, and a machine that supports Apple
| Intelligence, that sort of thing is built in.
|
| Click on the leftmost icon in the URL bar, select Show
| Reader, then click on Summarize.
| aruggirello wrote:
| Mozilla's new Orbit AI assistant for Firefox is in beta,
| BTW:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42555440
| fortran77 wrote:
| No, it was very interesting to learn about his process and
| the tools used to diagnose. (I had a similar problem with
| Acronis True Image killing KiKad performace on Windows!)
| cf100clunk wrote:
| As I replied elsewhere, the process is often a joy to read.
| In this case, perhaps a title like "Debugging QT5-related
| WiFi Dropouts in Windows" would have been better.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| Hackernews isn't a problems & answers forum, the process is
| just as important as the conclusion.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Agreed, the process is often a joy to read, but IMHO this
| article was like one of those joyless vids or AI-generated
| articles in which one must bulk scroll or fast forward to
| finally get to the goods.
| Andoryuuta wrote:
| Haha, this made me chuckle :)
|
| 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.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Thanks, it was nothing personal. :)
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I was certain that I read about a very similar issue here in the
| past, and after some searching, found this exact article posted 2
| years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524702
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Algolia Search and Refined Hacker News appear to treat title
| strings as case sensitive, so didn't highlight the original
| version...
|
| i.e. Unusual vs unusual
| Raed667 wrote:
| Not sure what you mean about the search? I managed to find
| the post from 2022 with no issue: `rEsOlViNg aN UnuSuaL WiFi
| isSUe`
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Now try using this url string Algolia Search:
|
| https://ryuuta.net/blog/diagnosing-an-unsual-wifi-issue/
| Raed667 wrote:
| OK i see what is going on, the 2022 post was a different
| URL that now redirects
|
| https://blog.ando.fyi/posts/diagnosing-an-unsual-wifi-
| issue/
| Andoryuuta wrote:
| Yeah, I should probably update my Hugo theme to include the
| date (not that I ever write anything on there anyways TBH).
| Also, the I changed domains not too long ago, so that probably
| added some more confusion.
|
| I wrote this in 2020 apparently:
|
| https://github.com/Andoryuuta/website/blob/b95a693c745688995...
| creeble wrote:
| Interesting - Anyone know if this problem affects QT5 under
| Linux?
|
| I'll have to do some digging to find out, but curious if anyone
| else has seen this on Qt.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| It doesn't look like that polling code was used under Linux.
| The fix was to only poll on Windows XP, since apparently this
| wasn't even needed on newer Windows versions. The bug was also
| fixed in 2018, so you would only be affected if your
| distriubtion ships a severely outdated Qt5 version.
| creeble wrote:
| Thanks so very much!
| 404mm wrote:
| This is very similar to an issue I battled for months on MacBook
| Pro (one of the later Intel versions, like 2018-ish), although
| there problem was not in the HW itself but the current version of
| MacOS at that time (this is no longer an issue).
|
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| This plagued a lot of remote workers when the trend started due
| to ping latency causing terrible VC quality like delayed speech
| , dropped frames, out-of-order frames . Very frustrating.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >and to do that, the current WIFI connection is temporarily put
| on a back burner, resulting in a brief delay in traffic.
|
| I can't believe they ever thought that'd be a good idea.
| cenamus wrote:
| Probably have to sweep across the frequency bands, so it's
| physically the only way to do it. Still stupid to do it more
| than once every 15 minutes
| wbl wrote:
| Fast switching on a background schedule while packets
| continue to flow but at slightly reduced rate should be
| possible. Might be very export controlled though given
| obvious application.
| bandrami wrote:
| This is a great example of good ideas destroying themselves.
| "Software should occasionally be able to find out where the
| computer it is on physically is" is a cool idea, but once it's
| there every single piece of crapware out there does it
| constantly.
|
| See also desktop notifications for websites
| xp84 wrote:
| Worth the read just for the delightful Gift Note from your
| brother. LOL.
| fullstop wrote:
| I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one sending and receiving
| notes like this with my siblings.
| tonymet wrote:
| I encourage techies to dig into their wifi hardware & software
| end-to-end. Install smokeping on a raspberry pi (even a $10 zero
| works). Ping all of your home devices , your gateway, DNS & first
| hops of your IP.
|
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| This is such a pain to do though, because so much of it is
| seeing braindead behaviors and not being able to do anything
| about it.
|
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| wired is best, but for many it's not possible.
|
| MTR is a good start, and easy to run on a chron job. Graph
| the results with excel
| creeble wrote:
| Good advice, but I'll add that there are many bad things
| smokeping won't detect.
|
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| you could use nmap or tcpping as the probe . smokeping
| supports any diagnostic
| settsu wrote:
| TFA never addresses what MediBang Paint Pro is using Qt for.
| Checking for updates, etc. (e.g., online account connection,
| sharing)?
| mrgaro wrote:
| As Qt is a GUI library (among other things) I would guess that
| Paint Pro is written entirely using Qt.
| settsu wrote:
| Ah okay, forgive my ignorance. The way the article is written
| I interpreted it to be a library.
| can16358p wrote:
| I have a completely unrelated issue: since switching to a new
| iPhone, only my iPhone occasionally can't access anything on Wi-
| Fi.
|
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| I had a similar issue!
|
| 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...
| ).
| deathanatos wrote:
| But why does querying the registry cause the WiFi to drop?
|
| 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.
| rincebrain wrote:
| If I understand correctly, it's triggering an actual wifi AP
| scan, and the AP enumeration in the registry is a side effect
| of finding the interface to go ask it to rescan.
|
| But I might be missing something.
| j-scott wrote:
| This is very similar to an issue I had while playing games on a
| wired Windows desktop. I haven't run into it in a long time now
| that I think about it. I wonder what might have changed.
| rincebrain wrote:
| My favorite stupid wifi thing I ever had, for some value of
| favorite, was a previous incarnation of my home router, which
| apparently had a known issue where certain Intel wifi cards
| connecting to the AP would cause it to start having firmware
| crashes randomly, which I discovered when I brought home a new
| laptop and my wireless on every device started being
| unreliable...
|
| 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.
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