Debugging Slow Wi-Fi on Linux
I have a dirt cheap NUC desktop with a windows installation that I use primarily for recording guitar.
Outside of running Reaper + a few Neural DSP plugins there's nothing else keeping me on Windows. This weekend my frustration with the Windows experience finally boiled over and I decided to install a Linux partition.
The installation process was super smooth, I booted into Linux Mint for the first time and everything seemed to be working perfectly. Things were easy, too easy...
After a couple minutes using the machine I found my Wi-Fi was performing super sluggishly. Things seemed to get worse and worse until requests were completely timing out.
I did a whole bunch of things to try and diagnose the issue:
- Restarted my router
- Checked the driver manager for missing Wi-Fi drivers (there weren't any)
- Disabled power saving mode (In the OS)
- Disabled power saving mode (In the BIOS)
- Disabled secure boot
- Upgraded to a newer kernel
None of the above worked 🤦
Finally after running iwconfig I noticed that my wireless network interface had power management enabled.
I managed to disable this by modifying: /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf
After rebooting I finally found my Wi-Fi connection was much more stable.