A periodic stutter when streaming

[Karhide]

Hi all,

To my delight I have in-home streaming working with extremely minimal lag over my wifi connection with the exception of one hiccup that can sometimes ruin games. I get a single spike of lag at regular intervals every minute or so and am having trouble diagnosing what this could be and/or how it might be fixed.

I'm not sure what else to say about it - other than that I have tried configuring the host and client options differently in the steam settings but to no avail so far.

Has anyone else experienced this and if so, any advice?

Thanks.

[Trogdor0]

Lag spikes and packet loss are part of the nature of WiFi, whether you are steaming or not. That is why a wired connection is recommended. Typical data loss over a wired connection is orders of magnitude less than a wireless one.

Regarding your issue, have you tried streaming with both PCs on a wired connection. If it still lags with both being wired, it's probably an issue internal to one of the PCs (periodic background task, malware, etc.) rather than the network (network driver issue, interference from other WiFi devices, EM interference from non-WiFi devices, cheap/faulty access point, etc.).

[Karhide]

Thanks for your comment.

I agree a wired connection would provide a useful comparison. Unfortunately there is a complete lack of phone sockets in the room where my desktop is situated and additionally the ultrabook that I am streaming to does not have any networking ports. Hence, wifi is my only option.

I think what gives me hope that this is solvable somehow is that the lag spike is so regular both in rate of occurance and visual appearance - leading me to believe that it is not just the result of the usual noise associated with streaming over wifi but caused by something that is happening periodically. Identifying what is causing the spike is another matter and I am not sure where to begin - any advice to that end would be greatly appreciated.

[ReBoot]

Do to get a performance warning in the lower left corner when this happens?

[BlueRaja]

I am seeing the same issue, running over WiFi. It occurs even when streaming is set to "fast". No performance warning is shown when it happens.

I'm going to run some Cat6 through my house in the coming weeks to hopefully fix the issue. I will report back here with results.

[Ruxaroh]

This post is 6 years old but I just encountered a very similar problem. The game streamed perfectly but at exact 1 minute intervals my connection died for a few seconds. After a lot of digging around i fount the issue to be location services on the client device. It sent a check out once a minute with a very high packet count, which impacted the streaming. Disabling location services fix my issue.

TLDR: Disable location services on the client device.

[Dreadheart]

Originally posted by Ruxaroh:

This post is 6 years old but I just encountered a very similar problem. The game streamed perfectly but at exact 1 minute intervals my connection died for a few seconds. After a lot of digging around i fount the issue to be location services on the client device. It sent a check out once a minute with a very high packet count, which impacted the streaming. Disabling location services fix my issue.

TLDR: Disable location services on the client device.

This. Was going crazy figuring out why streaming to my Nvidia Shield had periodic stutters. Disabling the location thingy on it solved all my issues.