Do router reboots help home network performance?

[thewayne]

Short answer? Probably not.

This writer has a complex home network. Mesh-enabled, lots and lots of devices plugged into it, a decent-sized family using it heavily. And he did some benchmarking at various times of the day, testing throughput with multiple benchmarks, resetting the router, then doing it again. Not rigorously scientific, but still demonstrative. The result? Didn't make much of a difference.

So he talked to some router manufacturers. And the responses were pretty uniform: modern routers are highly engineered and pretty robust, they're designed to be reliable and have high uptime. If you're having performance issues, the problem most likely lies elsewhere: computer needs a restart, network issue with your ISP, poor network design (you might benefit from a mesh or a faster connection). Or you may need a better/newer router. And, of course, keep your router's firmware updated for performance purposes and to ensure it's patched for the latest security updates.

Do I reboot ours very often? Nah. We have occasional power outages, in which case I'll shut off our UPS which will power off the router. The funny thing is that I read this article last night in bed before I went to sleep, and during the night Russet was working and our ISP had a network shutdown for maintenance. The first thing she did? Reset the router. Didn't make any difference since the upstream network was dead.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3125791/i-rebooted-my-router-and-busted-reddits-favorite-tech-myth.html

Comments

[ranunculus]

I'm pretty sure that the reason all us old foggies reset our routers is that it -used to- work. In the last couple of years I've noticed that it doesn't.

[arlie]

You upgrade your router that often? I think I'm only on my second since I moved to this house in 1997. More likely my third - for a while I was using an ancient linux box as my home router, stripped of as much of its potential attack surface as I could get rid of.

[ranunculus]

I had a couple of routers fail. While I was struggling with my last internet provider -they- upgraded equipment a couple of times. Now I'm using the Starlink integrated system.

[thewayne]

It's just sad that so many software problems are resolved with a reboot!  

[murakozi]

I was thinking the same thing. It's pretty rare for me to restart mine nowadays.

[arlie]

I've been "blessed" with a home router that was in the habit of losing its mind and needing a hard reset to find it again. Symptoms were worse than poor performance - one or more (but usually not all) of its clients would be unable to communicate, and neither rebooting them nor milder resets (networking only) would help. This taught me to add "reboot the router" to my list of simple heuristics for outage recovery.

I haven't had that symptom for a while; possibly it's a previous router; more likely it's the same router, but its behaviour improved when its environment changed. (I don't keep a log of when I replace what, or when outages occur and what succeeded in fixing them.) In retrospect, this is probably simultaneous with a linux system that couldn't seem to keep a constant IP address for its wifi interface. Possibly its flailing around was upsetting the router. Switching that box to ethernet only may have had the happy side effect of making the router more stable. And now that the problem system has a new distro, new kernel, etc. I have a well behaved home router. (Touch wood.)

[thewayne]

I've had the problem - which does seem to be slightly improved - that up here a router rarely seems to last more than a year or two!  I live at high altitude - 9,000' - and they just fail.  This one is over a year old, so maybe it's a bit stronger?  I suspect that it's a combination of thinner atmosphere and the free electron theory.  I also have a problem with backup hard drives only lasting about a year or so on average.  That, also, seems to have improved somewhat.

[disneydream06]

That's Spectrum's favorite "fix". UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And then they want to send out a tech to put another booster on my line.
No clue how many boosters I have had put on it.
Perhaps if your product was any good, I wouldn't have problems. UGH...
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

I find that I don't have to do a lot of router rebooting, except for firmware updates, but that when I am having issues with the network not working, it tends to be the ISP-supplied cable modem, or their things that are causing the problems, rather than the things that I'm doing. I think some of the other complaints might be about the wireless not quite being as good of coverage as we were hoping it might be, but if I really wanted to get into that, I'd need to get a mesh network, and mesh routers are still pretty damn pricey.