Kbp/s drops to 0 without any reason.

[shugarysubstances]

I really just don't know what to do anymore. This issue has decided to randomly crop up for me - and only me, on this PC. There is someone else who uses this PC and does not have this issue when streaming AT ALL. It's only me. I don't know what could be causing it. I've read over the article here on the forums, and ticked off as many of those boxes ahead of this post that I'm able to. This is the Twitch test result:

This issue only started happening, oddly enough, after installing a VPN (Surfshark.) In a last ditch effort to solve this, I uninstalled it COMPLETELY (checked device manager to make sure no tap drivers were left behind) and even did a network reset in Windows. I've tried messing with settings in OBS as well to no avail. I'm completely lost at this point. What really, really doesn't make sense to me is 1. this is a new issue with NO settings having been changed until troubleshooting and 2. the other user on this PC has no issues streaming.

We have one router/modem and the connection is hardwired. No other internet issues outside of this. Tried resetting stream key. Tried disabling the firewall in its entirety while testing. Prior to the network reset, I had been forced to manually update the ethernet driver as it was randomly shutting off (nutshell explanation). This issue has remained fixed (so far.) Here's the log from a recent test stream where I let it go until it dropped to 0 again. I'm sorry, as I know you all must get a LOT of these posts, but I have exhausted my ability to troubleshoot this on my own. Any help is appreciated.

 

[sandrix]

First, fix everything that the analyzer advises

Analyzer | OBS

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.

obsproject.com

Install a portable version that has its settings isolated from the installation version. Give OBS admin rights. Check it out without using any scenes, just a game capture.

OBS and OBS-Studio: Portable Mode on Windows

Running OBS/OBS-Studio in Portable Mode means all settings (Profiles and Scene Collections) are saved within the OBS main folder. You can copy the whole folder to a second PC or USB-Stick and use it wherever you want. Be aware, the File-Paths for...

obsproject.com

You can see network drops in the OBS statistics.

Checking for packet loss as I showed in this post.

Randomly dropping bitrate.

Been streaming for nearly 2 years now and this is a brand new issue that I can't figure out how to solve. When I'm streaming my bitrate will suddenly drop to 500 or less. I usually stream at 5k bitrate in 1080p. It will maintain this for a while and suddenly drop for maybe an hour or 2 then...

obsproject.com

 

[shugarysubstances]

First, fix everything that the analyzer advises

Analyzer | OBS

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.

obsproject.com

Install a portable version that has its settings isolated from the installation version. Give OBS admin rights. Check it out without using any scenes, just a game capture.

OBS and OBS-Studio: Portable Mode on Windows

Running OBS/OBS-Studio in Portable Mode means all settings (Profiles and Scene Collections) are saved within the OBS main folder. You can copy the whole folder to a second PC or USB-Stick and use it wherever you want. Be aware, the File-Paths for...

obsproject.com

You can see network drops in the OBS statistics.

Checking for packet loss as I showed in this post.

Randomly dropping bitrate.

Been streaming for nearly 2 years now and this is a brand new issue that I can't figure out how to solve. When I'm streaming my bitrate will suddenly drop to 500 or less. I usually stream at 5k bitrate in 1080p. It will maintain this for a while and suddenly drop for maybe an hour or 2 then...

obsproject.com

Got to the second step, and during the test, it's now dropping frames like mad.

We had this issue before, and I don't remember how I fixed it in my actual OBS install. I just let it kinda auto setup for this. I tried to use the WinMTR utility, but copy pasting the address on the twitch server website (with and without stream key) just gives me an error...

**EDIT**
I changed a couple settings and fixed the frame drop issue. Running another test... but I would really like to get the packet loss test to work in case I have to fight the ISP (the big one everyone hates) so I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong to have gotten just an error lol.

 

[shugarysubstances]

Got the WinMTR to work... I was putting in the address wrong (didn't fully understand from the provided screenshot but figured it out in the end) no packet loss. Twitch test actually provides stable quality at 80 across all NA servers (I know under 90 is bad, but I think that's a limitation of my ISP.) Not sure what has changed. Perhaps faulty hardware... our router/modem is only about a year old but we have been having some issues lately. I did switch out the ethernet cable as I found a nicer one laying around in a bin. (Cat5a VS I have no idea because it wasn't marked... this one is well within the limits of our speeds.) I'm mostly leaving this here in case someone else has this issue. Try all of these things. I've narrowed it down at this point to where if the issue crops up again it's either my router/modem is kicking the bucket or it's the ISP. Bless Google fiber, they're almost available at my address. There's little fiber optic cables sprouting from our front yard :')

Thank you for the self help links that I'm awful at finding.