Firewalla Purple - intermittent connectivty/random slowness
In the past week or two my Purple has been having strange issues causing severe slowness/lag for any devices behind it. When I run WAN diagnostics all tests look good (speeds, etc). I checked with ISP (Spectrum) and verified my connection to Cable modem is good, no signal loss, etc. and ISP logs show my modem has been up and working fine for weeks. Several times the Internet will appear completely down and I reboot the cable modem then it starts working again. My Purple is in Router mode and connects directly to cable modem. The LAN port of the Purple connects to a the LAN port on a wifi router that's acting as an AP for wireless devices and provides a couple LAN ports. I've read some posts that DOH or Unbound have caused issues for some people... Also saw that IPV6 can sometimes be problematic. I've disabled DOH/Unbound DNS. Also Disabled IPV6 on all Firewalla ports.
None of these changes seems to have made any difference..
Currently the Purple seems to sometimes work, but overall speed is slow and something is definitely not right. When I remove the Purple completely from the Network and just run the Cable modem straight into the Wifi-Router everything works perfect.
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like this. I havent done any upgrades (that I'm aware of) on the Purple.
I'm running: Box ver: 1.9740
App Ver: 1.50 stable release.
Thanks...
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Thanks for opening a ticket...
Not sure what you mean by "Lag issue behind the network.." All the issues only show up when the Purple is inserted into the network. If I remove it everything works perfectly. Are there any logs/diagnostics we can do on the Purple to see what may be happening? Others have reported strange issues like this that have only gone away when they factory reset their firewalla. I'd prefer not to do this.
thanks,
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You said you are encountering "LAG/Slowness" right? If your WAN is good, best is look at this article https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056875493-Speed-test-and-Speed-Optimization-on-Firewalla
Since there is a ticket already, you can also work with our support, they can guide you through it
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I've started to experience the same/similar issue with my Purple. Download speed tests show 50-150 Mbps (it's a Starlink connection, so it fluctuates). But upload speed tests show 0.01-0.1 Mbps! Many upload speed tests fail to complete. Started Sunday morning (2 days ago) and nothing I've tried seems to help.
Power cycle Purple. No change.
Power cycle Starlink Dishy. No change.
Disable Unbound. No change.
Change DNS servers. No change.
Disable rules. No change.
Disable Smart Queues. No change.
Remove Purple from the network and use my old Ubiquiti USG instead. Everything back to normal. 50-150 Mbps downloads, 10-25 Mbps uploads.
For speed tests, I'm using a variety (Ookla, Wifiman, fast.com) across multiple devices, wired (desktop), wireless (laptop, phone), and the gateway itself (Purple or USG).
I did notice in another thread that the Red has issues with P2P traffic. Does that apply to the Purple as well? I did enable a torrent client on the media server, but it's been running for a couple of weeks now without issues. No network changes were made on Sunday (I wasn't even home).
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Hi Freddie,
I originally created this thread and I'm still having the issues, but have been so busy I haven't had a chance to do any remote diagnosis with Firewalla to see if they can find the issue. I did a factory reset on my Purple as a last resort thinking I'd start from scratch. I tried using it again and it seemed like the slowness problems started showing up again. Very strange. I've gone back to using my old Firewalla Red for now and it works fine, but I really miss the power and throughput of the Purple.
Please post your findings here in this thread so myself and others may be able to figure out our issues.
Thanks
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Same issue here, I am using Xfinity Xfi, 1.2gbps, firewalla purple, and deco X55 mesh in AP mode.
Earlier this week wifi and wired became unusable, I checked speed and was seeing 30mbps upload and .04 download.
I connected directly wired to my Xfinity modem and got speeds of 890 down and 34 up.
I removed the firewalla and switched the deco to router mode connected directly to Xfinity modem and enabled dhcp and speeds were above 800.
I just hung the firewalla off my deco router and put the firewalla in simple mode and now I am barely getting over 100mbps speed upload and download around 10mbps.
I did a factory reset of the firewalla purple before putting it back on the network.
Any suggestions?
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Richard, have you created a case with us? we can go inside and do a diagnostics. email help@firewalla.com
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This is definitely starting to sound like a widespread issue affecting many Purple owners. Unfortunately, I only have 1 ISP connection that I need to keep up and running 24/7 so I'm unable to plug in my Purple for any long duration to have the Firewalla team connect and diagnose the issue.
All who are affected please report back on this thread if you find the root cause of this problem so we can all benefit and get it resolved.
Thank you!
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The best way is to open a case so we can diagnose the issue. We will replace the unit if it is a board issue.
We are aware of the purple upload issue; please see this update https://www.reddit.com/r/firewalla/comments/y1fm3g/comment/irzdzy0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
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Could this be related to heat, then, of it's a solder issue? When we first noticed the issue, the Purple was very hot to the touch. We moved it away from all other network gear, and it's cooled down after a day with no Ethernet cables plugged in.
Wonder if the extra traffic and monitoring from the P2P packets caused the system to heat up to the point things went south?
I've connected my Purple to the network again, enabled remote support, and passed along the info to support. Hopefully, they'll be able to check on things today. However, with 176 Mbps down and 0.1 Mbps up this morning, it's going to be interesting. :)
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Firewalla support... Can you provide more details around the known issues in that Reddit post?
- Is this a problem you can definitely confirm via remoting into the Purple, even though it's hardware related?
- Does this issue show up right away or does it happen over time and use? Its seems like my issue and others all started randomly after a certain amount of use.
Thank you..
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We have a script that's pretty accurate at the moment to pinpoint the issue.
At the moment, my understanding is, the problem does take a while to show up. Once it does, please let us know, we will replace it. If you can't send the unit in, I think we have a way to change the unit to negotiate 100mbits and have it work, that will keep you going until you are ready to send it back.
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