WWL missed broadcasts
Posted: Mon 29 Jan 2024 9:57 am
I posted this elsewhere but it's probably better here.
I was plagued with intermittent, but often long-running, errors about missing WLL broadcasts. Sometimes I seemed to get an error about no broadcasts in the last 30 seconds every 30 second repeated many times over.
Both my WLL and CMX server were WiFi connected and due to a re-organisation of my house LAN I had the opportunity to put them both onto wired Ethernet ports. Since then I don't see that error any longer and my stats have been 100%, so the issue wasn't CMX or Windows/Linux...it was using WiFi, almost certainly a 2.4GHz connection which tends to get wiped out at certain times of the day.
The real culprit is the WLL box. WLL is yet another piece of hardware that only supports 2.4GHz, which is already a very crowded and busy band, not just shared by WiFi...there's other stuff like Zigbee in the band too. Also, the broadcast method (UDP) has no guarantee of delivery so if a packet gets lost it's never repeated. That's a downside of using UDP broadcasts, although there are benefits to that too. The moral of the story is that if you want to be (more) certain that you won't lose UDP broadcasts you need to use a wired connection.
I was plagued with intermittent, but often long-running, errors about missing WLL broadcasts. Sometimes I seemed to get an error about no broadcasts in the last 30 seconds every 30 second repeated many times over.
Both my WLL and CMX server were WiFi connected and due to a re-organisation of my house LAN I had the opportunity to put them both onto wired Ethernet ports. Since then I don't see that error any longer and my stats have been 100%, so the issue wasn't CMX or Windows/Linux...it was using WiFi, almost certainly a 2.4GHz connection which tends to get wiped out at certain times of the day.
The real culprit is the WLL box. WLL is yet another piece of hardware that only supports 2.4GHz, which is already a very crowded and busy band, not just shared by WiFi...there's other stuff like Zigbee in the band too. Also, the broadcast method (UDP) has no guarantee of delivery so if a packet gets lost it's never repeated. That's a downside of using UDP broadcasts, although there are benefits to that too. The moral of the story is that if you want to be (more) certain that you won't lose UDP broadcasts you need to use a wired connection.