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What exactly happens when a WiFi router stops working and needs to be restarted to give you internet connection again?

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872 utenti della rete avevano questa curiosità: Spiegami: What exactly happens when a WiFi router stops working and needs to be restarted to give you internet connection again?
Spiegami: What exactly happens when a WiFi router stops working and needs to be restarted to give you internet connection again?

Ed ecco le risposte:

Routers are essentially tiny, low-power computers. They have their own operating system in there and everything.

When the OS is first started, it’s in a ‘clean’ state where everything is configured and working properly. All the services are in place, all the connections are set up, everything is green.

As the OS works, over time it might encounter problems. There might be errors. Some of those can be easily recovered from, some not. Some of them don’t cause any problems, some of them interfere with the router’s function, slowing it down or outright preventing it from doing its thing. Restarting the router returns the OS to that initial clean state where everything is working again.

It’s been a few years since a tech friend explained it to me. Iirc, he said something like when you power off/ unplug the device (most devices that use computer chips for that matter), it ‘drops’ everything it was doing. Essentially all the electrical signals flying around cease to be; including the ones responsible for whatever corruption is occurring. When you power on/ plug in, it’s like a hard reset. Again, it’s been a few years since and I’m certain there are much more knowledgeable folks lurking who will be happy to correct me but that’s the gist of what my non-tech-savvy brain could retain.

There can be many reasons for why a wifi router stops working. It can be due to a sudden change in the power current, it can be due to overheating and it can be due to random faults or bugs.

Basically restarting a router makes it stop whatever it’s doing, take a step back and try again from the beginning.

One issue is down to memory leaks. When you write some program, such as the OS on a router, it needs to keep track of info (variables) such as a list of IP Addresses, list of connections etc. Each of those variables need to take up space in memory.

What should happen is that when a variable is no longer required it is removed from memory thus freeing up memory to be used for other variables. The problem is if the program is poorly coded or has a bug then sometimes things don’t always end up getting cleaned up and over time you run out of memory – either causing some sort of crash or making things run very slow. Restarting the device will clear the memory completely and remove all the junk in there..

Spiegami: Memory is like a jar you add marbles (data to be stored) to. What should happen is any marbles (data) no longer needed are removed but this doesn’t always happen and eventually the jar overflows (crashes) and the only solution is to completely empty the jar by restarting your router.

The real reason why you have to restart a router is that no-one from the designer to the knowledgeable friend who can help you troubleshoot issues want to spend any time on the thousands of issues which might be the root cause of your error, when a very quick and simple fix is “restart the router”.

It’s easy, it’s quick, it gets the job done.

All the reasons given in other answers are just possibilities in a sea of possibilities. A router is a cheap computer, it has all the bug potential of a computer with all the fragility associated with cheap hardware.