Wifi speed spikes

[sebastiandre]

Hi!

I'm new to the Mac family with my first MacBook Pro with a late 2016 15" model. So far everything is great, but I noticed one major issue. My wifi speeds are not constant. Whenever I would normally be able to download something very fast (e.g. from Google Drive or Steam), I get download figures like in the following picture I attached.

What happens is that it goes to full speed of my connection, but then drops to anything between 100-400 KB/s, then goes back up to full speed and down again.

I tested this on different wifi networks and also compared the speeds to my old Windows machine - no spikes there. So it's definitely the MacBook or OS X. Any ideas?

 

[Rok73]

What kind of troubleshooting have you done so far? Made the router powerless for 30 secs and rebooted it? Any changes in the settings? Other networks that could interfere?

 

[sebastiandre]

What kind of troubleshooting have you done so far? Made the router powerless for 30 secs and rebooted it? Any changes in the settings? Other networks that could interfere?

Yep, I tried different routers, different networks and always doublechecked with my other laptop for comparison. I'm new to Macs and OS X, so I haven't gone in to network settings much.

This both occurs on 2,4 GHz and 5GHz network connections.

Also, I sometimes seem to lose internet although I am still connected to the wifi. If I activate and re-activate wifi, I get a connection to the internet again (although still with the speed spike issues).

 

[sebastiandre]

I also just tested the machine on bootcamp-windows. I get constant wifi speeds there. That means that at least it is not a hardware issue.

 

[Rok73]

It is weird that it happens with a machine right out of the box. Have you installed any extra software? Anything?

 

[sebastiandre]

Well, yes. After I got the machine and set up OSX I started installing software to get me started.

I have done some more troubleshooting. As I have bootcamp installed and don't get constant download speeds there, I tried a Guest Account on OSX and also created a second regular account. Both show the same issue.

However, when I got into safe mode, download speeds were working just fine on my normal account. Something that doesn't get activated in safe mode seems to cause the problem. Could it be in the OS? Could it be additional software I installed? Do I need to reset the system and start from scratch?

 

[sebastiandre]

Ok, it seems like I have found the program that's causing the issue. As I need Avid's Pro Tools for work, I had the Avid Application Manager installed. Once I disabled that application, download speeds went smooth again. A short search on google revealed that apparently a lot of people have that issue with the application. Seems like I simply need to cancel its autostart to get rid of the issue. Thank you, Rok73, for the hint with software causing this.

 

[Rok73]

@sebastiandre

You're welcome.