Gmail with Google Workspace constantly switching between Online and Active

HCHTech

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Pittsburgh, PA - USA
I have a one-person company that uses Google Workspace for everything and reported this problem starting 3 days ago. When she is logged into her Gmail, the little status box to the right of the "Search all conversations" bar frequently switches from "Active" mode

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to offline mode.

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When it's offline, of course things don't work, so this kind of a big deal. If you refresh the browser page, it comes back as Active, but soon switches to Offline again.

The computer has plenty of disk space, the internet connection is fine (I remoted in for about an hour to troubleshoot and her 1Gbs FIOS connection seems rock solid, and she is only using 15GB of space between Drive and Gmail, so it's not a storage issue with them. She is wired to the router, not using wifi. I tried setting an individual user storage limit of 50GB just for fun (her account should allow 100GB I think). No change.

She's using the latest version of Chrome, disabling the small handful of extensions she has made no difference, and AV and malware scans on her computer came up clean. She's running Win10 Pro 21H2. The problem is the same in Edge. Switching to using Google's public DNS made no difference. Clearing out the Chrome cache made no difference.

She tried for a few minutes using a Microsoft Surface she had as a spare and the problem was NOT happening there - it stayed in Active mode for the 10 or 15 minutes we had it running. That points to something about the computer.

Her computer is a 9th gen i5, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD and a discrete graphics card, an Nvidia Quadro P620. Normal Office apps and the like work just fine.

I'm thinking we're going to have to open a ticket with Google, although I'm not hopeful about that. Is there anything else I might try?
 
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I've used Google Workspace for years, in the browser and never even noticed that button!

A few things I'd try (if you haven't already)
Different network adapter (use WiFi instead of wired)
Reboot all network equipment
Try Firefox
Boot from Live CD and run it from there
 
Disable "let windows manage the power for this NIC" setting on the network card? In case it's briefly falling asleep?
Power management profile set to high perf...disable every/any "save power" setting?
 
Update: Problem doesn't happen with wifi. So it's either the NIC, the cable, the router or the port on the router. When installing the latest manufacturer driver and deleting/rediscovering the NIC in device manager didn't make any difference, I left them with instructions to try a different cable, a different port on the router, and then we would look into replacing the NIC and/or the router.
 
Cracked foundations lead to fallen houses. Bad interfaces happen, so do bad cables, switches, routers...

But yeah, this is a rare event so we all just tend to gloss over it.

If you had a smart switch installed the port that NIC was on would be alerting from bad frames.
 
I would have expected more problems with network & internet access, frankly, but I guess the Google interface was the only thing she was using that was sensitive enough to complain. What tool/procedure might I have used remotely to zero-in on the NIC faster? Obviously just a residential client, so no smart switches - haha. So far, all I've got as a learning experience is "Don't discount the NIC just because internet/network access is working fine." It would have been nice to get to the solution with less guessing involved.
 
This crap is basically why smart switches were invented. Smoke ping might have revealed it...

But without solid interface statistics this stuff is impossible to nail down, that's why we have them.
 
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