Question Devolo Powerline intermittent timeouts

[devvphil]

Hello,
I've recently moved into a new apartment and set up a simple powerline network (Devolo Magic 2) due to the quirks of the cable placements. I have one adapter in a separate room for my server and two in the living room for my PC and router respectively. They are stable most of the time, except every 15-20 minutes (sometimes every other hour) the connection times out for a few seconds. I've somewhat confirmed that the adapters don't lose connection with each other. I've done a few rounds of pinging the adapters and the router both from inside and outside the network. The conclusion is, when timeouts happen, I cannot reach beyond the adapters but I do reach other adpaters inside the powerline network. I also cannot reach into the network from outside i.e. something connected to wifi but i reach the router itself just fine. I've read about the possibility that smart electricity meters might interfere, but i turned off the feature where it reads the usage data every 15 minutes, which didn't improve things. The building is barely 4 years old so i doubt it's old wiring making problems. Any household applicances can also be ruled out as I saw no noticable drop in performance when the fridge or the microwave turn on. Next I suspected that one of the adapters might be faulty, specifically the one connected to the router. I swapped it with seemingly some improvements, but after a while there was another timeout, albeit it hasn't been as frequent as before. I'm sorta running out of ideas here. If I don't find a solution i will have to directly wire into the PC from the router at least since that one is most sensitive to timeouts. My server requires the powerline network though as there is not real alternative. If it's any help, the adapters operate at a constant CPU temperature of roughly 90°C and have VDSL compatibility set to MIMO 17a.
Weirdly enough, I used to have powerline adapters at my parents house and never noticed anything like that, even though the adapters were older and much further apart physically.
Also, I know powerline is not an ideal solution and something like MoCA or mesh wifi would be better, but my server does not have wifi and there is no way i will either run new wires in the walls or lay down a 15m wire to my server as it would require drilling through walls.

 

[bill001g]

Do you have any device directly plugged into the router so you can confirm it is not something like your internet connection dropping.

From what I gather you have the router plugged into one of the power line units and when you detect this problem you can still ping from say your pc to the router IP.

I have not used powerline units in a few years you can not actually log into these and do pings can you. The ones I used to use did not really have IP addresses and used some other protocol to access them.

 

[devvphil]

Do you have any device directly plugged into the router so you can confirm it is not something like your internet connection dropping.

From what I gather you have the router plugged into one of the power line units and when you detect this problem you can still ping from say your pc to the router IP.

I have not used powerline units in a few years you can not actually log into these and do pings can you. The ones I used to use did not really have IP addresses and used some other protocol to access them.

Yeah. I confirmed it on multiple occasion that my connection was fine. I wired my pc directly to the router to confirm while checking the connection on my server.

When the connection drops i cannot ping the router ip from a device connected to a powerline adapter.

The adapters i use do have adresses i can ping and did that to confirm my findings as well.

 

[bill001g]

Does your router have the ability to ping stuff. Can the router ping the poweline IP.

It would be very strange if the the router itself could talk to the powerline units but it could not talk to other devices that also could ping the powerline units.

I would be suspect of the cable between the powerline and the router if it is only the router that can not talk to the power line units...or maybe some very strange issue with the powerline unit connected to the router. Could you swap the powerline units around and see if anything is different.

Poweline units are pretty stupid. I am somewhat surprised they have IP addresses now days. They kinda act like a cross between a switch and a dumb hub device.

They at most keep track of mac addresses. Since all powerline units actually hear all traffic between all other powerline units i am unsure how this is done. Many years ago I used to know but devolo units are using a different technology than the older powerline units i looked at in detail.

 

[devvphil]

Does your router have the ability to ping stuff. Can the router ping the poweline IP.

It would be very strange if the the router itself could talk to the powerline units but it could not talk to other devices that also could ping the powerline units.

I would be suspect of the cable between the powerline and the router if it is only the router that can not talk to the power line units...or maybe some very strange issue with the powerline unit connected to the router. Could you swap the powerline units around and see if anything is different.

Poweline units are pretty stupid. I am somewhat surprised they have IP addresses now days. They kinda act like a cross between a switch and a dumb hub device.

They at most keep track of mac addresses. Since all powerline units actually hear all traffic between all other powerline units i am unsure how this is done. Many years ago I used to know but devolo units are using a different technology than the older powerline units i looked at in detail.

The router i got from my ISP is pretty stupid. I'm upset about that myself tbh. As for the router talking to the other powerline devices, I'm pretty sure it couldn't either. I was connected to the router directly with my pc and could not ping a powerline device, even the one directly connected to the router.

I did swap the units and at first I thought it was much better. Until i got another timeout. While i think it imporoved, I'll have to test this for an entire day to get any consistent results because none of this follows any reasonable pattern. Sometimes i get mulitple timeouts per hour, and for the past few hours i was testing today, i got maybe one or two for both adapters.

 

[devvphil]

It seems to have automagically fixed itself. Perhaps the smart meter configuration wasn't 100% completed or something. Regardless, letting a test run pretty much all day showed no significant timeouts except the occasional network spike that i wasn't able to attribute to the powerline network outright failing. I even have all of the units plugged in and working, except the one that was at the router is now at my pc and vice versa. I will swap that unit with the server unit as well to see if the unit has any significant imapct on performance, since I'm noticing the average ping being a bit worse on pc sometimes. If it is stable for the next few days, I will reenable the 15 minute readings on the smart meter to confirm if that was indeed the issue and report back. It's not like I'm in a rush since the refund window for the units has long passed anyways.