Wifi / network usage increases massively after a couple of minutes into playback

th0maz · May 15, 2020 at 10:23 PM

Hello everybody,

I hope someone can help me troubleshoot this issue or has an idea what's happening here.

I've got a Raspberry Pi 2 running the latest LE version. It's connected to my Wifi via Edimax USB adapter and streams media from a NAS or TVHeadEnd Server in the local network.

Now often when I start a video file or TVHeadEnd live stream or recording, it works fine for a couple of minutes. Suddenly the buffer circle appears and does not make it over another second of video every minute.

A reboot of the Raspberry Pi helps for the moment.

By chance I could monitor the wifi utilization when this happens on my FritzBox router and I guess that the Raspberry Pi running LE is causing the excessive wifi traffic:

I've had this issue for a while now, even with older versions of LE.

Any hint is helpful
Thanks in advance.

**chewitt** · May 21, 2020 at 5:55 PM Official Post

I'd guess that the stream starts, but over time the buffer drains and then once it's depleted we have to re-request chunks of media to fill the cache again and the seeking behaviour to refind the start point to recover the stream generates a load of traffic. TL/DR; WiFi sucks. If you run an Ethernet cable the problem will probably go away. If that's not possible sometimes the better alternative to a USB device is an Ethernet > Wireless bridge. I'm personally a fan of old(er) Apple A1rport Express devices used as bridge devices as they're small and generally give good reception.