What causes it to slow down and seem buggy? And what happens when you reset or turn everything off and back on to make it work better?
In: Technology
Software crashes and bugs occur in any reasonably complex program. While good programming will allow you to minimize disruption to the program, the cumulative effect of those bugs can have an overall negative performance impact. Resetting allows everything to get cleared the software to start fresh, restoring performance to normal.
I’m specifically talking about internet where you’ve got a pair of copper wires that enter your home. That’s what most people have (in the UK at least!) but there are other internet types.
When your modem (which is a part of your router) first tries to connect to the exchange, it tries to arrange to get the fastest speed. Your modem can detect how good your connection to the central ‘exchange’ is by listening to the ‘noise’ on the line (literally the same as when you’re making a landline call and there’s buzzing or crackling on the line) – so the router will try to negotiate with the exchange to ‘sync’ at the best upload/download speed possible, given how much noise is on the line.
Once it’s done that, that’s how fast your internet is. HOWEVER, the amount of ‘noise’ on your line will change – when it rains and if that conductive rain touches The very conductive copper wires (like because the insulation was cracked or old and degraded?) Then you’ll get more noise. So when you’re sending packets they’re gonna start getting garbled and the exchange won’t understand.
But it’s all good because the exchange detects these garbled packets and tells your modem to slow down – send packets more slowly allowing each packet to be more clear – to be heard over the ‘noise’. Every few minutes or an hour or a day, whatever, the modem tries to up the ‘sync’ speed again and either it will succeed or the rain is still there and it will fail. If the rain lasts long enough, the modem will just get used to the slower speed and just accept that this is it’s connection speed now.
BUT WHEN YOU REBOOT THE ROUTER, It starts from the beginning, trying to sync at the highest possible speed which is now faster since the rain has stopped. So the internet is faster after the reboot.
Edit: replace ‘Tue’ with ‘the’
Edit: replaced the below Terms with a simpler explanation.
You know how when you stay up super late you get really tired and start not functioning correctly…then you sleep and allow your body to rest and reset and you go through the next day more easily than the previous night?
That’s kinda what happens with computers (and a router is just a small, very specialized, type of computer). Over time software bugs cause weird things to happen. Good software can handle most of them okay but not always, and those instances of not always cause things to build up in the cache, can affect how things are stored in temporary and permanent memory, etc. Restarting the device clears the build-up of issues from these bugs and allows it to run better until those issues inevitably build up again.
Well-built devices (as in little to no software issues) can still accumulate issues, as hardware can contain defects and such. If the hardware and software were perfect, this wouldn’t happen and you wouldn’t need to restart the device to “make it faster”.
At the end of the day, a router is just a computer with specific hardware/software/firmware purpose built to route TCP/IP packets between networks, often to and from the Internet. And just like when it’s been a long time since rebooting your laptop/desktop computer or smartphone, you sometimes can speed up the performance of your computer by rebooting it. Same goes for a router. Why is this? Because when software completes a task, the operating system should release memory and storage resources back to the CPU for reuse by other software tasks. Sometimes this “release” step doesn’t complete correctly thus memory and storage resources get perpetually consumed. If this condition persists, eventually the CPU doesn’t have resources left to take on newer and more demanding tasks (the early days of Microsoft Windows, who didn’t have to reboot their Windows machine several times a week?) Better quality operating systems (Linux for example) provide better support for these kinds of procedures (Apple Mac’s are based on Linux, and I can go months between rebooting my MacBook). Back to the router question. Better quality routers using better quality operating systems (not super cheap) will do a good job policing the software tasks so that resources no longer needed are released back to the CPU for newer and more demanding tasks. Poor quality routers with poor operating systems (super cheap) will frequently need to be rebooted, to force the release of memory and storage resources to properly function. So if you cheap out on a router, you’ll be rebooting it every day, week, month, etc. I often get to explain the difference between consumer grade networking equipment vs. enterprise class networking equipment, to clients when they tire of the disruptions created by having to reboot the network every few days. If you spend correctly and get a quality router properly sized for your network, you can go years without rebooting with no lag in performance and no disruption in service.
Ok I read the comments and it makes sense that is kind of hard to avoid this. But why can’t the routers then have some internal check and auto reboot at a predetermined time once the get slow?
Computers, even small ones like a router, store a history of the things they handle. They erase this from time to time, as their memory is limited and they need to do more things. Sometimes the erasing doesn’t work so well, and pieces of the history can muck up the works for new stuff. So, resetting it is like deep-cleaning a white board – the spray, the scrubbing, etc. You start brand-new – nothing stuck in memory that can cause issues.
It’s also why you can reboot a computer and get the same outcome. Or your Roku box, or anything that “computes”.
Since the dawn of computers, and still as true today, rebooting solves the vast majority of issues that occur. That’s why any technical support will start with a reboot.
ELI5: Imagine you have a single piece of paper and a pencil. When people tell you things to do, you write them down on the paper so you don’t forget. As you finish things, you erase them, but your eraser isn’t very good and you’re in a hurry (because lots of people are giving you things to do!), so sometimes parts of words are left behind. After a while it’s hard to fit everything on the single piece of paper, so you start writing smaller, or write different parts of a task in different parts of the paper. Restarting the router is like getting a new piece of paper, whatever someone might have told you to do before doesn’t matter, and you have all this empty space to write things down.
Other people mentioned, not all routers are like this. Cheaper consumer-grade routers are more likely to have less memory and less care given to their software. Enterprise-grade routers are usually expected to not need to be restarted unless you’re updating the software or upgrading the hardware, but they’re usually more expensive than the routers you get from your internet provider or from Best Buy. As a personal example, my router hasn’t been restarted in over three months, and the same setup at my parents’ house has rebooted four times in the past year.
I think it makes the router choose a different channel that is less used by other routers. But this is just a guess.
Routers contain CAM and Routing tables which can fill up requiring the router to be restarted. Routers also have RAM which can fill up. Enterprise level routers rarely require a restart but home routers are of less quality.
A routers UI or routing software can encounter issues, this isn’t a common problem with regular routing software but if an attacker attempts to exploit the router it can crash the software.
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