Photo by Jakub Zerdzicki on Pexels If you’ve ever wondered why a simple restart router weekly can feel like a performance upgrade, you’re not alone. Home networks are constantly juggling dozens of devices, firmware quirks, and ISP‑side traffic shaping. A weekly power‑cycle clears the digital cobwebs, letting your connection run smoother and faster. How Routers Accumulate Latency Over Time Every packet that travels through your router is logged in temporary tables called NAT (Network Address Translation) and ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) caches. These tables help the router quickly map internal IPs to external ones, but they aren’t infinite. Over days of heavy streaming, gaming, and IoT chatter, the caches become bloated with stale entries. When the router can’t find a matching entry, it must perform a fresh lookup, adding milliseconds of delay per request. A quick reboot flushes these tables, forcing the router to rebuild them with only active devices, which cuts down the roun...