WLED crashes and reboots every xx minutes (mDNS)
Over the past year we’ve been getting various reports of people having issues with their WLED controller (QuinLED or other) rebooting unexpectedly. This can of course have various causes but in this specific case it’s a reboot every 5 minutes or every hour almost like clockwork.
It’s been identified that this is often an issue linked to the WiFi network they are connected to and certain traffic crashing WLED.
mDNS spam
Often people experiencing this issue would be able to stop the reboots by unconfiguring their WiFi network and run the board in the default “WLED-AP” access point mode. This would solve the issue and they would experience no more reboots.
It was later identified that a lot of these networks had a large amounts of mDNS traffic on them and that the ESP32 would become unstable receiving these large amounts of mDNS bursts/spam/traffic and while trying to process it. The sources for the high amounts of traffic was often Hubitat and in fewer cases Home Assistant software.
Fixing the issue on the WLED side
The best fix would be to fix whatever is causing the excessive amount of mDNS traffic. If that however is not possible, in most cases, it’s been enough to empty the mDNS field within WLED.
In WLED go to settings and then “WiFi Setup”. There you’ll find a field called “mDNS address” make sure to clear anything in that field and save it. After that makes sure to reboot (info -> reboot WLED) to make sure the changes take effect.
Fixing things on the other side
Of course WLED itself isn’t responsible for the crashes, something else in your network is sending spam that makes WLED crash. For Hubitat for instance it can help to disable it’s “Bonjour” service, stopping the sending of the spam! That way you can still use the mDNS feature of WLED in your network.
End conclusion
With either of these fixes hopefully you can now enjoy a non-crashing WLED!