.Markku Reunanen.

Linux WLAN/WiFi unstable ping

May 8th, 2017

I’ve been experimenting a lot – perhaps a bit more than I ever wanted – with USB WLAN adapters on Linux, trying to get a reliable low-latency connection. Some dongles are just bad and some drivers are undoubtedly bad as well, in addition to which different manufacturers’ implementations don’t always work together. Especially infuriating has been the huge lag in ping, which can jump to a few seconds at its worst. It turns out that the drivers or dongles can’t be blamed for all of this, but Gnome Network Manager (“Network Connections”). See here:

When there is no fixed BSSID set, Network Manager decides to do some occasional background scanning, which seems to slow the connection down to a crawl. Solution: choose a BSSID from the menu and it won’t. All in all I’d recommend steering clear from these USB kludges altogether, but at times you have no alternatives.

Filed under: laitteet,linux