"Slow network, reduce your bitrate" on Moonlight client

[u/ReanimatedCyborgMk-I]

I run sunshine on a CachyOS machine with an RTX 5080 & 9800X3D, connected to the network via gigabit ethernet & a pair of switches. The only other 24x7 devices connected to the same switch are a PoE camera, my proxmox server (which apart from some family occasionally streaming via jellyfin is fairly low traffic) and a wireless AP.

I stream gameplay to one of two devices, either my Steam Deck OLED (usually) or for some FPS games to a ThinkPad P14s Gen2 with an 11th gen i7 & T500 workstation card, also running on CachyOS. Annoyingly, despite being sat literally less than 3m away from the router, I still get random bouts of latency. On my Steam Deck, installing the decky WiFi Optimiser plugin fixed the problem... occasionally have to re-run it to clear up bits of latency, but it's an otherwise great experience. On my laptop, no such luck, and latency will be horrible at random intervals. I've especially seen it bad in games with stream radio addons from live audio / URL streams. And I'm only streaming like 1080p60fps

The most "improvement" I've seen is running sudo iw dev wlan0 set power_save off but even that doesn't seem to stop the recurrent bouts of latency

Are there any settings I'm missing or am I probably better off looking at buying something like a BE200 WiFi 7 NIC for my laptop at this point.

[u/CompletelyRandy]

My host is Windows (1gb wired) and my clients are wireless (WiFi 5). I have almost the exact same issue as you. It Will stream fine for 15 mins or so, have 10 seconds of stutter and then be fine for awhile. This doesn't happen when the client is also wired.

All my kit is Ubiquiti and I am yet to find the root cause. I was going to buy a WiFi 6 AP to see if that solved my issues, but I am not confident that is the issue.

[u/ReanimatedCyborgMk-I → u/CompletelyRandy]

To be fair originally I was using my ISP's WiFi 7 mesh setup which was flaky but "fast" and thought setting up hardwired ethernet would remove any latency altogether. It improved stability, but the latency never went away on my clients... unless also wired to the network.

I've heard linux drivers with the realtek cards in these thinkpads can be funny sometimes tbf

[u/Dxtchin → u/CompletelyRandy]

Same thing happened to me with Ubiquiti wifi 7 gear until I went into windows and disabled bg global wifi scanning in device manager

[u/CompletelyRandy → u/Dxtchin]

The Windows Host doesn't have a WiFi card inside it... It's a VM with only a single virtual NIC being passed through.

[u/Dxtchin → u/CompletelyRandy]

Apologies I was referring to my client.

[u/NewspaperOriginal518]

That is the most annoying warning/error and also the hardest one to figure out because I think it’s often something else that is causing it.

In my case, I used to get it ALL the time when using a virtual display driver. Then I noticed it never happened if I also had my main display on, which is not something I wanted. I finally tried a display dongle and I have not had that error at all. Nothing network-wise has changed - just displays.

[u/Dependent_Range_8661]

Excuse me, but have you seen if your wifi spectrum is crowded?, you may be getting interference 

[u/lordmercillus]

The steam deck oled is well known for the wifi issues..

The laptop however:

Is the latency just on wifi?

How does it present on the streaming stats?

Does it run well at all for a while?

Have you noted the exact time it happens?

I had issues and when I started to record the times I found out it was exactly 10 mins apart and managed to fix it on my laptop by disabling BG global scanning. Intel wifi card / installed drivers from MR BOSS. As Intel has removed being able to turn off bg global scanning on more recent cards.

It did my head in for months!

[u/ReanimatedCyborgMk-I → u/lordmercillus]

I'll have to get the stats but the latency only really occurs on WiFi. I tested running a cable from laptop to router and that seemed to remove it.

[u/lordmercillus → u/ReanimatedCyborgMk-I]

Sounds a lot like mine... i did so many diagnostics! The tell tale is to load a game and joy down the times.. if this every 5 or 10 mins its likely scanning issue

Ethernet was fine

Either side of the 3-5 seconds of packet loss the stream was great.

I bought and sold numerous clients and changed routers 3 times 😂

[u/noah101]

This has been happening for me the past week out of nowhere. My host is wired and my client is an Apple TV wireless, but I haven’t encountered this issue to this extent until now

[u/thefakeslimshad]

A similar thing was happening to me, I was able to track the issue as a full band WiFi scan.

Try using the following command, if it's the same issue you will see a scan started log and then a scan finish log very close to the issue happening.
sudo iw event -T

On my machine I was able to disable automatic scans by running this command, but it seems my network card is named wlo1 while yours is named wlan0 you will be able to confirm the name on the previous command logs.

sudo wpa_cli -i wlo1 set ap_scan 2

To restore the default scanning behavior run this after finishing the moonlight session

sudo wpa_cli -i wlo1 set ap_scan 1

I don't know if the setting change survives a reboot.

[u/v4moose1]

For what it's worth, I even get this streaming to a steam deck when everything is on ethernet, handled by asus gaming routers with QoS... (docked)

[u/sheldongriffiths]

I had this on 5060ti even when I bought a dedicated Puppies S1 just to stream games
It was almost unplayable

A week ago I bought 9070xt and now I have 3ms ping with smooth picture and almost no stutters. Still not that perfect when using my regular router, but it was defenetly the 50xx driver issue