I think "wonky" is a technical enough term to describe what seems to be happening with my network.

I probably give my network the most patience, probably because I know what goes into making it work.

At dinner yesterday, I heard grumbles from the rest of the house that their Internet activities were frequently slow and often interrupted.

From the boyo, I could see the most ire, as he usually plays games with his pals, but I can also see resource difficulties with his iPad as he plays Roblox while on a conference call with his group, and often has a browser full of YouTube videos in the background.

The daughter was most "meh," as she does half of her stuff on a WiFi iPad and the other half on her iPhone, which is mostly video and voice conferences with her peeps, and videos or streaming shows, so interruptions are usually not noticed, or are occasional lags and buffers.

The missus was the most upset, though. Her laptop was only interrupted, it seemed, when she needed to do something important. She demonstrated at the table the inability to load a browser page on her phone on WiFi, but saw it immediately load on cellular.

I've noticed some blips and burps, but I'm probably too patient.

I checked the router management pages, and only noticed that one of them had a pretty high memory usage (probably firewall rules), and even when the Internet bandwidth was "high," it was much lower than I expect it to handle. The other has a much more generous set of hardware, but also handles the most devices directly.

They are both ASUS WiFi routers, but only the one offers WiFi for the house. 

That router has all the bells and whistles offered when I bought it new a few years ago, and it's still in the top 5 offered, although it isn't as powerful as its since-offered "pro" version. It offers three WiFi networks with different SSIDs, to match generations of devices so I don't have to find and reprogram the various things plugged in around the house. It also (occasionally) brings an IPv6 tunnel in when I want to tinker with that, too. About half of its GB of RAM was in use, which is about double what it uses after it first boots, and none of its quad CPU cores shot over 20% for more than a moment. It isn't delivering as much Internet bandwidth as it has in the past, when directly connected to the ISP's fiber router; I think the other router is a little subpar.

The troubled router is a few generations older, although it was also the top offering at the time. It has hit EOL, so it's limping on the last supported firmware. It's a stand-in until I can get a better router. I had bought what I thought was a straight-up TP-Link router for the task, but I couldn't get it to route without NAT, and when I reached out on their forums, I got kind of a "why would you want to?" response. Its 256MB of RAM is frequently near 75% utilization, which is probably some kind of resource starved.Its WiFi is on, but only offers one IP so I can reach it directly without going through the other. Its main purpose now is to provide the two servers and other WiFi router with wired connections and static IPs open to the Internet. It runs a little bit of firewall, mostly defending against bad packets and direct access to the router from the Internet, but leaves the device firewalling to the devices. As such, I expect its activities should be largely routing. Both of its dual CPU cores are regularly hovering near 50%, so I suspect that's where the struggle is.

After checking all the settings, I couldn't see any reason the routers should be under-performing. I checked for unwanted clients, and found a few that weren't identified directly, but soon discovered which Apple devices they were, with their MAC obfuscated in Apple's scheme to be unrecognized on the Internet. I restarted the router, just to clear the RAM and firewall rules, and heard the groans throughout the house for the minutes during the reboot, and the occasional struggle to reconnect their device.

This morning I also checked the edge router again, and didn't see any differences. I rebooted it since everyone else was gone, and it started a whole lot of grumbles from devices as they struggled to reach the Internet. That has since settled, I think.

Running a speed test in the house is disappointing, though. Watching the QoS displays on the router shows anticipated waves of activity, occasionally pushing toward the 1GB that matches my service, but it generally hangs with peaks of about half of that or less. Running a speed test from a WiFi device, like this Mac, generally gets a throughput of 200-300Mb/s. Directly from the quad-core WiFi router gets 600Mb/s. The dual-core edge router seems to only be able to handle 200Mb/s. I think the device drop is WiFi speed related, and the WiFi router speed is either its resource cap or the cap of the edge router. At that router, when connected to the other fiber router, it was able to get GB speeds. The edge router is probably hitting its resource caps, since it's so busy doing the other things. Note it's all skewed as there are other servers running, and 50 devices, including the television streaming something at 4K.

I'm looking into getting a better edge router, but hope to avoid the same disappointment as I have in the last one.