Sudden bad lag starting Monday of this week, cannot figure out the issue
- @cghague
Some givens, the laptop is USA tethered to tinypilot and we are trying to connect from Asia. Suddenly experience extremely slow lag on the image this Monday. Completely unusable.
From US, I am able to access tinypilot and it works completely normally.
I am using tailscale and thought its was a DERP issue, no its not. I completely reflashed the Tinypilot sd card. Completely got rid of tail scale and tried port forwarding, tinypilot seems fast for initial 5 seconds then is extremely slow. Average ping is 300ms, yet still does not work. US ping is at 100ms and works fine.
Asia network speed is 300mbps/250mbps. US speed is at 100/100 and works fine. I tried to use a computer with 16gb of ram instead of 8gb in Asia, doesn't have much effect, still extremely low speeds.
What works is desktop remoting in(or zoom meetings remote control) to a second laptop in US, and accessing the first laptop through tinypilot, this is working pretty fast and well but not sustainable.
I am at a loss on what else to try. No matter what I try US seems to be working fine, but Asia does not. I have eliminated everything I could think of, internet speed is amazing, direct connection to tiny pilot through port forwarding instead of tailscale, upping the Asia computer to 16gb ram computer, reflashing sd card. Absolutely nothing fixes the extremely slow Tinypilot. Changing resolution and fps has no effect at all and judging from the speed of the internet, this is not a connection speed issue.
I should mention before last weekend(June 21 and before), the same 8gb computer with tailscale was working completely fine from Asia.
Any suggestions?
Edit: I just noticed the fan is not spinning at all. It was spinning very loudly for weeks before this. Not sure if this is the issue, doesn't really explain why its fine is US but slow in Asia.
Edit 2: I have a fully functioning second Tinypilot which I reflashed and setup with tailscale. We were able to connect to it from Asia and it was working fine for about 1 minute, it was able to quickly display images and be controlled. After 1 minute the issue appeared again. I checked here in US its all up and running fine the whole time.
Edit 3: Switching the asia laptop to phone hotspot seems to work??? Hotspot speed is far far slower yet its working fine? Could the ISP or router be blocking connection??
- CCharles Hague @cghague2024-06-28 23:40:07.967Z
Hi Tim, thanks for your message. I'm sorry you're having latency issues.
You mentioned that the lag improves if you connect using a hotspot, suggesting the issue is with your regular Internet provider. The likely explanation is that the H.264 video stream is blocked, causing you to see the slower MJPEG fallback instead.
Could you please send me two links to your logs, one from the hotspot and one from the regular Internet provider? That should help me confirm what is happening. You can get the logs by going to System, then Logs, then Get Shareable URL.
Regarding the fan, recent TinyPilot devices can vary their fan speed dynamically as required, so it's not unusual for the fan to be silent. Once I receive the logs, I'll check them to ensure your TinyPilot device isn't overheating, just to be safe.
Not sure what the issue was. Another wifi network also is working fine. It seems that one particular private network at a friend's house in Asia had issues, as this was not working on multiple laptops with that network. Even though I was seeing speeds of 100-150/100, it would only work for the initial 30 seconds after a boot up and break again, even switching it to 5fps and 1 on video quality had zero effect on latency issues. I no longer have the logs for the old network or access to it unfortunately.
Seems as though the fan is also fine as I am not seeing temperatures over 50c in the logs. I am guessing the new upgrade fixed the noisy over used fan.
- CCharles Hague @cghague2024-07-01 13:03:08.066Z
Thanks for getting back to me! If the issue seems specific to a single network, the most likely explanation is strict NAT or a restrictive firewall blocking H.264. You can see if TinyPilot is using H.264 or MJPEG in the status bar at the bottom left of the page. I understand you're no longer using the affected network, but if you do, please check if TinyPilot is falling back to MJPEG on it but using H.264 on others.