Crazy pings at router

R

rak0062

n00b
Joined
Dec 27, 2007
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48
I'm running ping tests on my wired pc and when I ping my router 192.168.1.1 it's all over the place from 1ms to 20ms. Yet if I ping my modem going through the router it's rock solid 1ms for as long as I'm running the ping test. I'm using a Netgear R6300 router and all ping tests are running at the same time.


I've always gotten 1ms pings with other Routers I've owned. Am I worrying about nothing?
 
Probably. Returning pings is not typically a high-priority process. Unless you are seeing some other issue, I wouldn't worry about it. Check your CPU utilization on your router to be safe.
 
I had the same issue with my R6300. I rolled the firmware back a couple of revisions and it solved the issue. All pings are back to <1ms.
 
You are pinging the management plane, not the forwarding plane. The management plane is given less CPU priority. This is normal behaviour in any router.
 
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Also make sure another device on your network does not have the same IP as your router.
 
It's definitely the firmware that's causing the erratic pings. Go back a version or two and it'll be back to normal.
 
Depending on what you're using it for such as sharing an external hdd etc it might be limitation of the CPU due to overload. Even if its not prioritized this should be below 1ms unless you have a wonky switch in the middle or something like that. Consumer routers doesn't really downprioritize ICMP or such even though the OS might support it but as BS911 pointed out, its most likely firmware related. Given the nature of closed sourced firmware/hardware blobs it may/may not be fixable.
//Danne
 
Handling and replying to packets != forwarding packets.

You can have a switch or router forwarding packets at wirespeed while replying to pings with 20ms upwards. No problem there.
 
But as I said, consumer routers doesn't do this kind of prioritizing in 99% of all cases...
//Danne
 
As long as you get expected throughput and latency between two LAN hosts connected to the Netgear and consistent latency to first hop after your gateway (or connect a workstation to the WAN port to test) then you shouldn't worry about it. Netgear is probably running some unix flavor and it's busy servicing a higher priority process. I wouldn't roll back to an older firmware and lose whatever fixes and enhancements over it.
 
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