Network traffic explosion when leaving "output to lights" on

[ryanssking]

I have 27 universe spread over 2x unicast IP's all E1.31.  This computer is win 10 with dual NIC's.  One is routeable to the internet and the other is LAN only.  Controllers located on LAN2.  It appears to work just fine for testing in the beginning.  I left output to lights on for an hour and suddenly the network was crashing. Seeing 60mbps on one port and 40mbps on the other.

I ran wireshark and found the internet nic passing 10.xx.50 traffic which is a LAN2 side address.  However I did see 10.xx.11 correctly going over LAN2.  Not sure why the program or windows seems to send the traffic this way.  I did see a post from 2014 asking about dual nic and it doesn't appear to be a setting to choose a specific network adapter.

Also not sure if the dual nic causes the traffic race problem.  Soon as I shit off output the traffic dies.  Turn it back on and the traffic soars back up.  If I close the program, reopen it, open the same sequence; turn on output to lights, I get the 1mbps traffic level back to normal.  Over time it eventually becomes that higher burst of traffic.  I have no multicast setup right now.

I'm going to do more tests to try and find if I can break down the differences in between packets captured. Y wireshark at normal vs high traffic.  One file is 405mb because of how much was being sent per second.  Also going to try and go lan2 only to see if there is a dual network issue.

Has anyone else seen massive traffic over time while leaving output to lights on?

xlights version 2016.53

[msiebri]

I took a quick look at mine for comparison.  I only have 1 NIC, I run all traffic through it and leave the wireless disabled.  I also don't split my network out, everything in the house and the lights coexist on the same network.

I have 59 universes spread out over 10 different controllers.  Attached is a snapshot from perfmon.  I have had xLights up on this machine for several days now.

Martin

[ozaz]

several users, including myself, have noted this problem in a thread on the ACL forum

[Gilrock]

Yep most of us didn't know about it because we don't use the xLights scheduler.  It doesn't have a way to choose which adapter to use for output.  Keith did add a message to check sequence that will list which IP address is being used for output.

[keithsw1111]

XLights lets Windows choose which adapter to use. Generally if your networks are setup well this works fine. If you have 2 adapters with same network then you may have issues as Windows does not always make the right choice. In these cases either disable the unused network or fix your network config.