major glitching of entire show at reduced brightness

[perigalacticon]

When I upload a reduced brightness sequence to FPP, it glitches horribly, pausing for up to several seconds and then racing ahead it's horrible.  Has anyone experienced this?

I have tried everything I know, resetting, rebooting, power cycling, disconnecting the internet from the router, nothing changes it.  Props go offline and don't get data, I don't understand why nothing works if I set the brightness lower, it's extremely frustrating because I want to run something at night after hours.

[bwinter]

Reduced brightness in the sequencer (XLights)?

[perigalacticon]

Playing from FPP or xLights.  Specifically there is a sequence of solid colors across all the props that should be happening every .5 seconds but sometimes they hold for several seconds and then appear to race ahead to catch up.  Sometimes the controllers hang as well. It happens if I run it from FPP or directly from xLights.  It's like it gets behind then races ahead to catch up. 

[bwinter]

I had issues this year with reducing brightness using the FPP plug-in.  Same type of outcome you describe.

[perigalacticon]

I am reducing brightness by selecting the entire sequence and then doing a bulk edit.  I have a whole house group that is controlling everything for the entire sequence where the glitching happens.

[babybear]

I have found this to happen to me when I don't have enough power injection going on. What are your runs? are you feeding power at both ends of every strand no matter how short? Anything over 300 pixels are you injecting in the middle? what are your power supplies set for, voltage? Are the controllers set for 100% or are those also reduced? Just trying to rule out hardware before we get into software.   

[perigalacticon]

It happens to every controller/prop.  I have one ESPixelStick for each prop.  There are 16 props/controllers.  All of them pause and race at the same time synchronously but not always.  This happens when playing from FPP on a RPi4 or outputting to lights from XLights.  So I suppose what's in common is my router.  It's a low cost model I got just for running XLights.  It's a Netgear AC1000. 

Do you think this behavior is typical of a router problem?  I've found power cycling the router has sometimes fixed other problems.  I was thinking that maybe at low brightness levels the streamed data is possibly more complex and requires more time to send?  However, I run the plasma effect on the whole house model and it runs smoothly. That data surely is way more complex than sending solid colors (the same values) to everything. 

[babybear]

When I run my show it doesn't run via my router  My Pi feeds a switch that goes to my controllers and BBBs. My router does feed the switch only to setup everything. Other than that my router has nothing to do with my show. At times ill remove the router from the switch via a A/B switch so the grandkids don't get into it.

[perigalacticon]

All my controllers are wireless ESPixelSticks.  They connect by WIFI to a show router that is not connected to the internet.  My PC is connected by Ethernet to my home router (a different router) which is used for internet for all my internet devices.   When I need to login to FPP or any of the controllers that are connected to the show router, I simply connect the PC to the show router WIFI network.  Then I can access all of them easily from the PC.  Then I disconnect the PC from the show router wifi to eliminate any communication from the internet on it.  It's the same concept as yours I think except instead of a switch I have the router since everything is WIFI.  I will try upgrading the router next.  BTW the glitching is not due to controllers that are disconnected (or not running), as FPP will notify immediately that it cannot ping the controller on the status page, and I can deactivate the channel for that controller on the FPP outputs page.  Even if I don't the show still runs normally.

[jnealand]

Without a wifi show router, my show would not run.  The master Pi is connected to the router via ethernet and all wifi to the remotes is sent via the router.

[perigalacticon]

Yes that's what I have, see attached: