[Android Central Question]

Hello!

I've got a Samsung Galaxy S2 tablet that has been running fine, but recently I started noticing that periodically (especially first thing in the morning) that the ping time on my internet connection (as checked from my desktop PC) has gone very high.. up to almost 2000ms!

I have finally isolated it to the Tablet. The tablet is connected to a separate wifi router. I first discovered that disconnecting this router from the network solved my ping problem. Then I isolated it further, to find that it's the tablet. If I'm seeing the long ping times, I'll unplug the charging cable from my tablet.... ping times immediately recover. Even if I simply wake-up the tablet, ping times will return to normal. if I leave the tablet OFF the charging cable all day, I never see the problem. I've tested this for over a week to confirm it wasn't just a coincidence.

This leads me to a pretty solid conclusion that something is running in the background on the tablet that ONLY runs when it's on the power cable and has been asleep for a while. A backup to the cloud? Some kind of spyware app doing something nefarious? I hope not!

Is there any way I can figure out what app is running? I'd have to somehow spy on it's network traffic remotely from my desktop PC.

Please advise. Thank you!

[Rukbat]

I'd suspect that the tablet is sending garbage to the router when it's charging, but replacing the tablet would be a lot cheaper than having a lab figuring out what the tablet is doing. (They'd have to run a pretty good recording spectrum analyzer on the tablet, then analyze the recording. Something like that would run into the thousands of dollars.)

Back up everything on the tablet (see Backing up an Android Device if you don't know how) then reflash the ROM (see [Samsung] How to flash Stock ROM via ODIN) and see if that helps. If it doesn't, you have a hardware problem, and replacing the motherboard (which would be the first step) probably wouldn't be worth the price. (You can buy a new one for about the same price.)