Hourly 100% Packet Loss spikes lasting ten seconds that start 10 Minutes after Booting

[Viqer Fell]

Asrock X670E Taichi
Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2GHz

1x Crucial T700 2TB Gen5 NVMe M.2 

 

2x WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB M.2

G.Skill DDR5 64GB PC 6000 CL30 (2x32GB) 64-GX2-TZ5NR AMD E

ASUS GeForce 4090 strix OC
Router is a Technicolor DGA4134 Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6 Smart Ultra-Broadband Gateway
Windows 11 pro 64bit

My PC is connected to my home router with a cat 8 cable, the home router connects directly to the fttp socket. I have a 1GB dl and 0.1GB upload. The router diagnostics appear normal and the issue persists even with a router reboot.

From the time I boot, approx 10 minutes from the point of booting I see 100% packet loss events that last approx 10 seconds. This will then repeat hourly albeit occasionally it drops down to moments of less than 100% and for less time this is the exception not the rule. I had this at the start of year (Nov23-Jan24) but after uninstalling Norton 360 and uninstalling NordVPN it seemed to go away. Albeit it would re-occur occasionally if I connected to Nord and then subsequently disconnected the VPN. However I stopped running Pingplotter all the time so hard to tell when it did restart exactly. Problem is when it happens it will freeze my discord for 20 seconds or so and will disconnect me from online servers/games.

I ran pingplotter 5 the paid (not pro) version for weeks the first time and I went through every possible thing i could to troubleshoot the cause. This included physically changing cables, unplugging all other devices from the router (it also connects to a Devolo Mesh Wifi as the router wifi doesnt reach far end of house) & a Zyxel switch that I use as a hub for my synology NAS, consoles and TV etc. I have tried running pingplotter on a laptop using same cable (i switched the PC to WiFi for this period). The laptop suffered no packet loss at all. The PC over WiFi had same pattern. 

I have tried looking at running services, scheduled tasks etc but I'm not an expert and to be honest whilst I believe i am pretty methodical with troubleshooting I am at a loss how to diagnose what is causing this on my PC. 

I am not too proud to admit this problem has beaten me. So I am humbly asking for some expert help from a community of people who may be best placed to help in terms of knowledge and experience. 
If anyone feels like being a good samaritan and turning Sherlock Holmes for a moment, please let me know what other information would be helpful or if you have any thoughts or ideas. 

 

[Sawa Takahashi]

<joke>

Maybe you should book an exorcist before they're all booked up for Halloween....

</joke>

Well, you certainly did a lot of work already. Seems that you router and Internet provider are clean since another computer did exhibit the same symptoms. Your ethernet cable should be good too since wifi from the same computer has the same problem.

Did you try with a fresh Windows install ? Either reformatting your boot drive or replacing your boot drive with another one and then installing Windows from scratch). This should help find if it is a hardware or software issue.

If the problem goes away with a fresh Windows, then it probably was a driver issue, a buggy app or some malware that was causing the issue.

If the problem persists with a fresh Windows, it is likely a hardware issue. Maybe there is a driver (for the motherboard, the chipset and/or the ethernet3wifi adapter) that can fix the issue but it is also possible that the issue can't be fixed unless you replace the faulty component.

 

One last thing you can try is using a USB adapter to connect to your router (wifi or ethernet). This one should have a distinct driver from your motherboard's and may be a viable workaround. But personally, I'd contact the seller for an exchange if the motherboard is at fault. Such an expensive piece of hardware should not exhibit an annoying flaw like that.

 

Hope that helps and good luck !

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, Sawa Takahashi said:

 But personally, I'd contact the seller for an exchange if the motherboard is at fault. Such an expensive piece of hardware should not exhibit an annoying flaw like that.

WiFi and the wired NIC are two very different pieces of hardware, its very unlikely if not impossible this is motherboard related.

 

Like you said, I'd be wanting to try with fresh Windows as this is most likely something on the PC causing this if its only happening on this one PC.

[Viqer Fell]

47 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

WiFi and the wired NIC are two very different pieces of hardware, its very unlikely if not impossible this is motherboard related.

 

Like you said, I'd be wanting to try with fresh Windows as this is most likely something on the PC causing this if its only happening on this one PC.

Thank you & to Sawa for the replies.

I did wonder about a fresh install but if i reinstall everything I wonder if the same problem will reoccur again. I sort of dismissed the fresh install as an option given the problem went away for nine months. In my head I am seeing this as a software issue and given the regularity i wonder if it is some form of scheduled task or service that is running. The difficulty I had in trying to troubleshoot that was that I havent found a way to see what process or thing was running at each point in time so I could try and correlate the thing to the event.

I really regret not having Pingplotter running permanently as I would have been able to date and time when it restarted and then assign blame to a Windows update or a software install maybe at least.

At this point Sawa I'd rollout a ouija board if I thought it would help. 
I decided to take a few months off the booze ot help with weight loss and sleep quality. To quote Airplane, looks like i picked the wrong week to give up drinking.

[Alex Atkin UK]

9 minutes ago, Viqer Fell said:

I really regret not having Pingplotter running permanently as I would have been able to date and time when it restarted and then assign blame to a Windows update or a software install maybe at least.

Question is, does ping plotter wait for all responses or if your connection is overloaded and the response takes too long, does it count it as lost when in fact it might just be late?

 

Ping is only a rough guide as its considered low priority traffic and depending on the router it may prioritise say game traffic whereas drop/delay pings.   It could be any router between you and the pingplotter server itself, if that's what you're monitoring.

 

Example, you see those red spikes of packet loss on my connection?

I've never seen any real-world evidence of them.

 

Granted, that is monitoring the actual broadband router from a site on the Internet, not the Internet from a client.

[Viqer Fell]

13 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Question is, does ping plotter wait for all responses or if your connection is overloaded and the response takes too long, does it count it as lost when in fact it might just be late?

 

Ping is only a rough guide as its considered low priority traffic and depending on the router it may prioritise say game traffic whereas drop/delay pings.   It could be any router between you and the pingplotter server itself, if that's what you're monitoring.

 

Example, you see those red spikes of packet loss on my connection?

I've never seen any real-world evidence of them.

 

Granted, that is monitoring the actual broadband router from a site on the Internet, not the Internet from a client.

Thanks, given the laptop didnt experience the same issue I had sort of discounted it being a router / network traffic issue (rightly or wrongly). I also typically dont have my router respond to pings but I did enable it for a few weeks earlier in the year and ran think broadband which showed no anomalies. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

9 hours ago, Viqer Fell said:

Thanks, given the laptop didnt experience the same issue I had sort of discounted it being a router / network traffic issue (rightly or wrongly). I also typically dont have my router respond to pings but I did enable it for a few weeks earlier in the year and ran think broadband which showed no anomalies. 

It would be strange, as obvious if it was the laptop having issues on WiFi and PC being fine wired, we'd be thinking very differently.

 

Its certainly a very confusing situation, I'd say maybe the CAT 8 cable is not great and somehow picking up interference (as none of the cables higher than CAT 6a are really trustworthy IMO), but I can't imagine it causing this particular issue.

I'm not beyond blaming Windows network stack as I've had some very odd issues with it over the last ten years or so.  For example one specific network card I own would crash the network stack entirely under load after a specific Windows Update (and I never knew which one), but is suddenly working fine again years later.  Same card in Linux always worked perfectly.

[Viqer Fell]

5 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

It would be strange, as obvious if it was the laptop having issues on WiFi and PC being fine wired, we'd be thinking very differently.

 

Its certainly a very confusing situation, I'd say maybe the CAT 8 cable is not great and somehow picking up interference (as none of the cables higher than CAT 6a are really trustworthy IMO), but I can't imagine it causing this particular issue.

I'm not beyond blaming Windows network stack as I've had some very odd issues with it over the last ten years or so.  For example one specific network card I own would crash the network stack entirely under load after a specific Windows Update (and I never knew which one), but is suddenly working fine again years later.  Same card in Linux always worked perfectly.

I started uninstalling small batches of software and rebooting and running for an hour. I was working backwards on anything that i could recall had asked for consent to update or where there were installs that had not shown any obvious issues upon install in the last few weeks but could have been the culprits.

Problem has gone away. 

Suspects are:

Apple Mobile Support Services installed behind the scenes when itunes updated.
Antares client for autotune pro
Bandcamp DAW
Codemeter runtime kit installed by one of the above two pieces of music software.

Oh and just to make things fun, whilst i was swapping the cabling back into the port after testing the wifi again, i pressed the the flashback bios button with the ethernet cable which resulted in a bunch of motherboard software re-installs. 

God tech can be frustrating somedays

Thanks for peoples answers in trying to help. No idea why any of those bits of software would do what they did and if i am being honest i am mainly looking at Apple as the main suspect given its the only possible common piece of software that would likely have existed on my pc nine months ago when this last happened when i thought it was norton.