The Ethernet PAUSE frame
Ah... The problems of crappy consumer ethernet equipment ( I work at an ethernet switch vendor so excuse the rant )<p>What is likely happening is that your switch is configured by default to implement both rx and tx pause. What is happening is that your TV who's also erroneously ( in my opinion ) configured to transmit pause goes bonkers, starts sending pause to your switch. Your switch then starts buffering packets for your tv until the buffers are full and then starts transmitting pause to everyone else including ports. The switch must have some horrible buffering policy where one port ( the tv port ) can hog all the buffers and deprive every other ports of being able to send...<p>Now the kicker is that the way every endstation implements pause is this... Notice the pause quanta in the Pause packet is in units of 512 bits and in the packet you captured it is set to the maximal value of 65535 which is on a 100Mbps port ( presuming 100Mbps since the Mediatek has 4x100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) and 2x1Gbps ( Gigabit Ethernet ) that computes to >>> 512*65535/100.e6 = 0.3355392seconds<p>A normal Pause sends this packet periodically and once it has buffers to receive will send a pause with a quanta of 0 meaning cancel previous timer... but if it's malfunctioning who knows if it ever will...<p>The sad part is that I don't even know what to recommend for a good consumer level switch that has good defaults or configurable defaults and sane buffer config... Mine is a dinky one probably vulnerable to this problem as well... Need to do some research.