Network Lag & Multiple Switches

firemanjim · Mar 8, 2018

Hi everyone

I have an annoying issue with network lag and I would like some advice if possible.

I try to play online games on Xbox one and get intermittent lag. My connection on, for example, Call of Duty shows as orange rather than green. Randomly, every so often, I get bad lag. I suspect the times that it noticeably lags it is red.

I have a long distance between my main router and Xbox. I only have two ports in my router, one that goes to a gigabit network switch and from that I have further gigabit switches serving other parts of the house. So from my router there is the initial network switch and one further connecting devices near to the Xbox.

I have around 20 wired devices around my home including a CCTV camera, SkyQ boxes, a NAS drive, Sonos speakers and several PCs. There seems no difference to this issue if say, someone or multiple people are watching TV or streaming Netflix etc.

I have Sky fibre broadband at the highest level possible.

My first question is, is there anything (maybe PC software or similar) I can install that monitors network activity in some way so I can run over time to possibly see if a device is swamping the network at certain times?

My second question is, I assume that multiple network switches are going to slow things down a little. Is this strongly advised against? Are some network switches better choices than others for this purpose and how does it explain the intermittent nature of the lage? It is not viable to run a cable direct and I wouldn't want to even entertain it unless I was 100% certain it would solve it.

I am happy to test anything but unsure where to begin, so any advice on how to start testing and finding this intermittent connection would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

kanewolf · Mar 8, 2018

You would have to have a managed switch as the first device after your modem/router. A single gigabit uplink to the router. You could then use SNMP to capture statistics off the ports in the managed switch.

bill001g · Mar 8, 2018

You could daisy chain 100 switches and it might add 1ms of delay. Almost all modern switches are considered non blocking. They can run all ports at 1gbit up and 1gbit down all at the same time.

It is highly unlikely your problem is in your lan. It could be if some device sends massive amount of something like broadcast traffic or you have some duplicate ip/mac issue. This is not very likely. Pretty much the slow connection in your path is the internet. That really is the only connection you can see a bottleneck on.

But as indicated above you only option to see any traffic is with a managed switch. If you REALLY want to know what is running on any port most switch have a mirror/monitor feature which duplicates all the traffic to another port so you can capture it with a pc running something like wireshark.

You can then actually see the data packets and see delays and data loss. It is not some magic easy to use report, to get real useful data you have to really learn how to interpret the data yourself. It has tools to help but you must do it yourself.

firemanjim · Mar 8, 2018

Thanks a lot for the responses. This makes sense and I am reassured that the daisy chaining is not the issue.

I see Netgear do what is called a "Smart Managed Plus" switch which seems to do port mirroring and possibly may help identify other networking issue - so is this something up to job?

If it is something using too much internet bandwidth, cauing a bottleneck, or just a general internet issue, then what methods could I use to go about diagnosing / proving this? My current router provided by Sky does not provide such statistics - well not that I can find anyhow.

Any tips or things to test here?

Many thanks once again.

ChuckNorse · Mar 8, 2018

I had a similar issue after installing CAT5E from the switch in my basement to my living room. It was around 50 ft of cable and I crimped the connectors on myself. I misread the directions when installing the router side male connector. I had the pairs configured for a patch cable. One I realized my error, I tried to correct for it on the wall jack side by switching a few wires around. It actually worked and I could connect to the network, yet my bandwidth was horrible. I discovered that even though all of the correct connections were being made, the speed was down because I changed up the twisted pairing and there was interference there. I discovered, by accident, that you have to maintain the twisted pair structure of an Ethernet cable for the speed to be supported. I wasted a lot of time screwing with the router and PC before I figured out my bonehead error. You may want to test your cables.

bill001g · Mar 8, 2018

Does the netgear have the ability to give you usage stats for a port. You should be able to see how much traffic (except for wireless) is going to your router and then to the internet.

I would take a pc and try wireshark on a port mirror. Maybe you get lucky and something will stand out. It does give nice utilization graphs and lists of devices.

br00n0 · Mar 8, 2018

AS you seem to have many devices and using different services, what you could also do is check QoS settings in your Internet router/modem. Maybe increasing the XBox priority over other services will reduce lag spikes.

Good luck!

firemanjim · Mar 8, 2018

Thanks everyone. That is really great help. I have ordered the switch and I will see what I can find out.

I did have suspicions on the longest run of cable as I had some instances of loss of traffic a while ago. I perhaps wrongly, assumed that if the network showed as connected and traffic was passing then all was good but seeing the response from ChuckNorse maybe there could be an issue with this cable that is potentially causing a bandwidth issue. It won't be the pairing specifically as I have recrimped this cable several times.

So I will update this thread when I find the answer!

Thanks again

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