Is it actually jitter or is it potentially the wireless network card going into sleep mode? I have seen that type of behavior on Apple products when the cards go into low power mode although I can’t say I have noticed that on my laptop.
> On Oct 29, 2020, at 8:11 AM, Mark Tinka <mark.ti...@seacom.com> wrote: > > Hi all. > > I've been on High Sierra for several years now due to a limitation with an > app that couldn't deal with Apple's latest rounds of system permissions since > Mojave. Eventually, I gave up on waiting for them to fix it and upgraded my > older Butterfly keyboard laptop to Catalina 4 weeks ago. > > At the same time, I picked up the new Magic keyboard laptop 2 weeks ago which > came with Catalina. > > Over the past week, I've been troubleshooting a massive jitter issue on > Catalina, just between itself and my home router. For control, I have a > Windows PC (tower-top) using a wireless adapter to connect to my home > network. That has no jitter at all. > > I have noticed as much as 300ms+ jitter on Catalina. > > I then asked a few friends around the world to run tests for me on their own > Catalina installations to their local router over wi-fi, and the results are > the same. Jitter so high that what should be a 1ms - 5ms latency can (for a > short period) jump to 200ms+, 300ms+, 400ms+. > > On the off-chance that it is an issue with the new wireless chips on the > later MacBook models, one of my friends tested the same on a 2013 MacBook Pro > running a beta version of Big Sur. Same story! > > Another friend in South East Asia, testing on a 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro > running Catalina, also had the same issue. > > A Google search suggests that this is some known issue since Mojave, to do > with Location Services, and some other apps, in a non-deterministic way: > > > https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/263638/macbook-pro-experiencing-ping-spikes-to-local-router > > For me, even after disabling all or some Location Services features, the > problem remains. > > Is anyone else seeing this on their Catalina Mac's while on wi-fi? If so, > does anyone know what's going on here? > > Ideally, this wouldn't matter if it was just a cosmetic issue - but I do > actually see physical impact to performance of network access to/from the > laptop, which has all the hallmarks of high jitter and/or packet loss. > > An app like Zoom, which can display network performance data for a session in > real-time, does indicate nominal packet loss for audio and video on this > device, while other devices on the same WLAN are happy. > > Thoughts? > > Mark.
