Why do I have to reboot my router occasionally to stop gradual network degradation?

I have a Netgear C7000v2 AC1900 modem/wifi router and I've found over the last year that I have to restart it almost daily or else over time when I play Overwatch I start seeing more and more packet loss and latency. Right after I restart it I usually hover around 40ms average latency communicating with the Chicago server with little/no loss. After about 12+ hours I start seeing latency spikes to 100ms with the occasional packet loss. By 24 hours later it's spikes to 200ms latency with more than just a little loss. I'm not really sure what restarting the router does. Is it a hardware issue? Some sort of software issue?

Solution 1:

First, the thing that works (half the time) is to do a firmware update, do a hard reset of the router to factory specifications, set it up again and test it.

If the above fails to resolve the issue, that would be the time to replace with a new router.

Solution 2:

In very broad terms, domestic routers have a brain the size of a peanut & are easily confused.

They open ports, then lose track, so the port gets clogged, things go stale & the internal tables quickly fill the RAM. The poor little thing just doesn't cope well.
Some games are worse than others for spewing a myriad constantly-changing connections; this just exacerbates the situation.

One online game I used to work helpline on would open up to 400 connections at once*, all short-lived, ephemeral. On many of the lower end domestic routers this would entail a reboot every day or so to keep them up to speed.
I fixed my own issues by installing a corporate gateway… now I reboot for firmware updates every month or four, with zero issues in between.

^{I checked this using the much more advanced gateway with comprehensive inbuilt stats & logs. Sometimes with two of us playing in the same house, it would read over 2,000 simultaneous connections. This was no problem at all for the big-brained device, but would cause issues on a domestic router}