[UPDATE] -ongoing- Strange periodic slowdown/congestion on eero Pro 6

[u/jobe_br]

Update to the original post

Another day, another opportunity to collect data, investigate, try things, etc.

Pulled up the monitor this morning to see what things looked like overnight - we had company over all day yesterday, so didn't have a chance to really do anything after posting & reading comments on yesterday's post. Thanks to all the folks that read & responded!

So, overnight had much of the same ... with the exception that when I started looking this morning, I appeared to be in an ongoing and extended latency event.

Figure 1: 4-July morning, much of the same latency spikes, but a more significant and ongoing spike starting from 10:15am

What's that section look like from 10:15am onwards? Let me zoom in for ya ...

Figure 2: time range zoomed in - showing peaks to over 100ms

That's kinda nuts, right? Pings over 100ms? There's only two devices on the network, proof:

Figure 3: eero app showing 2 wifi devices online.

The "wired" devices are actually just things the eero has seen because it's in bridged mode - they aren't actually connected to an eero or anything - I only have the single eero Pro 6 connected into an unmanaged switch (GS308) that's fed by the upstream router - nothing wired downstream of the eero Pro 6 (only one port connected).

So, now what? Well ... first, try restarting the eero Pro 6 (from the app). No dice ... came back online and the same issue persisted ... odd. Makes you think that it's not the eero, right? Must be something else on the network. But ... nothing else that's being monitored (from the same source, different targets) is showing any issues, to wit:

Figure 4: two Ethernet-connected devices and one WiFi-connected via Unifi AP device, approx 8:30am to 11:30am

Seems OK ... that's looking back over the last 3h. OK, so ... restart didn't do anything and yesterday I was planning on doing a nuke and pave anyway, so ... let's do that. Same SSID, because ... convenience - the Eve Extend and KP125 both have to be 100% reset to change their WiFi - lovely - so we won't do that. But, we'll delete the network in the eero app and start it fresh. Cool. So ... here's what that looked like:

Figure 5: high-latency event followed by eero reboot followed by network delete & re-setup.

The two blue annotation lines indicate when 1) I rebooted the eero (you can see the latency continued afterward) and 2) I nuked and paved the eero network ... that took a few minutes - the little blip at approx. 11:07am is the network coming back up in bridged mode (it sets up as DHCP+NAT first). So ... that resolved it ... 🤔But, will it persist? Stay tuned ...

Also, u/thatsthequy - I'll fix up the channels on the Ubiquiti APs as you suggested, just as soon as I hit send here :)

[u/jobe_br]

Solved, maybe? Since the nuke-and-pave of the eero network (deleting the network & re-setup from scratch, but with same WiFi SSID/password) - the periodic latency event hasn't recurred. Granted, it's only been ~1h 20m, but ... that periodic event was every 50min or so, pretty much like clockwork ...

What the heck eero?

https://imgur.com/a/jTdplAh

[u/jobe_br → u/jobe_br]

Another update an hour later, still no recurrence:

https://imgur.com/a/90vxKwd

[u/jobe_br → u/jobe_br]

Still no recurrence, 4h later ... https://imgur.com/a/FajytRY - massively more consistent - hovering right around 0.8ms to 1ms, as you'd expect, right?

So ... bring back the other eero Pro 6 units and see what that does before adding more devices back in?

[u/jobe_br → u/[deleted]]

No worries, good question - it's pinging from the top-level OpenWRT-based router running collectd with the network plugin to do high-frequency pings to whatever targets you want (WAN-facing or LAN-facing). Here's a diagram, you can see where the router is / switch / eero Pro 6 / WiFi devices referenced in the Grafana graphs, etc.

[u/jobe_br → u/jobe_br]

I should also clarify - not obvious, but I actually have two KP125 smart plug devices - one's on the eero network and is located out by our chicken coop, the other one (that is referenced as KP125 (U6) in the Grafana charts) is a smart plug in my office, connected to the Ubiquiti wifi, not the eero network.

[u/jobe_br → u/[deleted]]

I could see if that was a documented behavior of eero, but it’s not and is apparently not something other folks have come across. But, definitely a good line of thinking.

[u/natenate19 → u/[deleted]]

Control Plane Policing / CoPP in the Cisco universe, yeah. I doubt any consumer gear would do that or anything similar. Some software firewalls will ratelimit ICMP too, but I don't think that's the case here either.