ASUS RT-N66U how to identify source of traffic spike

Question

I have an ASUS RT-N66U as my home router. We are experiencing some traffic spikes in downloading over WiFi that slow all other activity to a crawl.

Is there a way to identify the source (ip/host) of the traffic spike from the router's web interface?

My next step would be to disconnect that host.

I'm fairly noob in this area - any help appreciated, thanks! :)

Solution

Contrary to a widespread myth, saturating one’s bandwidth with a big download or upload should NEVER cause a latency spike for everything else. If it does, you’re probably hitting a widespread and well known router bug called bufferbloat.

Use http://dslreports.com/speedtest (note: this is NOT Ookla speedtest.net) to get your bufferbloat grade. If you get a bad grade, look into enabling FQ-CoDel (or any later smart queueing algorithms to come from the bufferbloat research community) on your router. You may need to install open source firmware such as OpenWrt on your router in order to enable FQ-CoDel. Enabling Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is helpful as well. Also consider adjusting traffic shaping on your router to make your CoDel router a slight bottleneck so that FQ-CoDel can kick in before bloated buffer queues build up anywhere else.

Or look at purchasing a turn-key solution such as EvenRoute’s IQrouter.

Comments

[GraehamF]

thanks! :) tho, i'm stuck on step 1: DD-WRT does not have a download for ASUS RT-N66U

[Sverre]

it does say that there is a real risk of "brikking" it, so, so make sure you are very carefull, see here dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Asus_RT-N66U

[Francisco Tapia]

this answer do not provide the solution to the OP.

[RomanSt]

Only problem is, it seems like bufferbloat is the default behaviour of any modern piece of consumer networking kit...