Dripping blood

Yesterdays BQM to my router doesn't look good.

My Broadband Ping

What's puzzling me is that I also have a BQM running to my NAS box using IPv6 and that looked OK:

My Broadband Ping

Overnight, between 2 and 3 AM, it returned to normal with nothing happening at this end.

Looking back through previous days there was a very small amount at odd times on Monday, then all OK back to Mon 24th when there was a similar amount to yesterday, again stopping in the early hours of the following morning. Looking further back there are more odd days with varying amounts of blood.

Since the latest Firmware update on the FRitzbox a few months ago I have noticed this qyite a lot - IPv6 to my server is fine but IPv4 to the router often has latency spikes and up to 20% packet loss showing.. I don't believe it is a genuine problem (though there could be difference between the paths of the 2 protocols I suspect it is more down to the fritzbox not repsonding than any real connectivity issues.

Interestingly for the last week it was looking all good again - until the connection dropped on Monday night and has since been showing llots of packet loss and latency spikes again on IPv4.

I've always assumed it's something to do with the Fritz!Box de-prioritising pings. I get a similar effect on my BQMs, like yesterday:

My Broadband Ping

My connection's fine. Several years ago I had major packet loss with lots of "blood" on the BQM, and the impact on the connection speed was very noticeable.

I think it's totally down to chance whether you get away with doing BQM monitoring with the Fritzbox. If you download and decrypt the config you can see that pings have a 1 per second rate limit. If you have some amount of jitter then sometimes you'll have 1 ping per second, sometimes 0, and sometimes 2...

yes as jimbof says its a given with the Fritzbox config that for monitoring pings unless they are less frequent, we need to ping an IPv6 address on the LAN behind the router - something that is always-on and preferably wired.

The OP's NAS is already performing that role so should be regarded as the real stats.

For others trying to set this up, the Fritzbox Permit Access section allows for both v4 destination NAT (port forwarding) and v6 firewall-allow rules, so there is a dedicated tick box for allowing PING6 (to an IPv6 interface ID).
This means you can allow PING with or without other TCP/UDP ports and without needing to expose the device completely to the Internet.

Exactly the same has been occurring for me and I too know this is not a real world issue (e.g. when pinging google from my Fritzbox no packets dropped whatsoever) as it does not affect my connection in anyway except when trying to ping the router (which leads to what appears to be considerable packet loss and latency).

Edited by kam67 (Fri 12-May-23 22:43:01)

What puzzles me is that it can go several days without any dripping blood at all (there's been none since around 5am on Wednesday) when nothing internally has changed. There is something external that is causing this.

Been with zen 3 years and only noticed this packet loss in the last few months, it happens random day and night.
Still happening now, and im a light user on 80/20 fttp.

check my graph https://ibb.co/9Nnt4Z3

Why are zen not doing anything about this ?

hmm i just made a post and its no longer here how odd, and had no message to say who removed it and why...

I was replying to these posts to say that for the last few months i have had packet loss day and night with my zen 80/20 fttp connection, even had it over night into this morning.
i did post a link to my graph showing all the packet loss but maybe i broke rules in doing so, so i wont add it again just incase.

What id like to know is ... Do zen know about this and are they working on a fix!

Edited by gnt (Wed 31-May-23 08:38:58)

I suspect your post just didn't get properly submitted rather than being deleted. I have experienced that a few times on here - never quite sure if it is the site or an error on my part not pressing the right button.

As fo the apparrent packet loss - the general concensus is that most of the time it is not actually a genuine issue and is probably down to how the fritzbox handles the requests.
The fact it seems to come and go is a slight mystery - could be down to subtle changes in the network or maybe an interaction with some routine network monitoring/checking that Zen perform.

I have the same thing on two of my lines - several days clear, then a day or two with up to 10% packet loss, then back to clear. The trigger seems to be around 1am-2am

I have reported it to Zen, but after having to run without a phone for over a week, and then being asked to remove all equipment connected by ethernet for another week, I lost patience and decided to just live with it.

Interestingly, Zen consider packet loss up to 10% acceptable

This is how mine looks at random times of day/night, i use the free router provided by zen.


https://i.ibb.co/ZxFZhQW/Screenshot-2023-05-31-14322...

Edited by gnt (Wed 31-May-23 14:38:53)

In reply to a post by ukwiz:

I have the same thing on two of my lines - several days clear, then a day or two with up to 10% packet loss, then back to clear. The trigger seems to be around 1am-2am

I have reported it to Zen, but after having to run without a phone for over a week, and then being asked to remove all equipment connected by ethernet for another week, I lost patience and decided to just live with it.

Interestingly, Zen consider packet loss up to 10% acceptable

Are you using the Zen Fritzbox routers?

In reply to a post by jimbof:

Are you using the Zen Fritzbox routers?

Yes, the 7530 with OS 7.56 (new today - was 7.50)

Edited by ukwiz (Wed 07-Jun-23 14:11:20)

You're basically doomed then if you are expecting to get any reliable BQMs over time. They can and do exhibit the dripping blood often. I'm no fan of Zen myself, but berating them over dropped packets would be wrong until you've tested with another router that doesn't have ping rate limiting.

Quite.

I have always had this, on and off, using the Fritzbox stock configuration.

I flashed my 7530 with OpenWRT (which now supports VDSL for these) and I don't get it now. I use OpenWRT for other reasons, not the dripping blood, but it didn't seem to affect internet connections in any way that I noticed. See my sig for BQM with 7530+OpenWRT.

I have had Dripping Blood on my Vodafone connection on and off for long time. Some days I have none at all

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Edited by penpusher (Fri 09-Jun-23 14:00:00)