Intermittent Wifi connection

[ideaoven]

I am an experience developer but new to ESP. I am working on a HomeKit application, and have successfully built and flashed a NodeMCU ESP32 eval board (ESP-WROOM-32) with a sample app using esp-homekit https://github.com/maximkulkin/esp-homekit. I am using the ESP-IDF SDK version 3.1.1.

While running the same app to blink the board LED, I noticed poor responsiveness and timeouts when activating and deactivating the LED using HomeKit. During my troubleshooting, I also noted that when running the app, pings to the ESP32 IP are not returned EXCEPT every minute when 2-3 pings are successful.

After this experience, I then built and flashed the simple-wifi sample app onto the board to test the connectivity with a more basic app to remove any dependency on the esp-homekit code. When running with this app, the app connects to wifi with no issue but then the same issue with ping occurs. I modified the simple-wifi code, to capture other wifi events, and based on the events received it appears that the wifi connection is maintained but the pings are unreachable except every minute 2-3 are returned. The one minute interval would suggest a task is running every minute that is "waking" the LWIP stack or the wifi connection.

My AP is an Apple Airport, and is very reliable with other connections I make to it.

I was hoping to gather feedback on whether or not others have seen this issues, and any advice on events I might log to further troubleshoot.

John