Dropped packets on a wired interface

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I have one device (a Windows laptop with a docking station which provides an Ethernet port) connected to a router via a wired connection and a number of dropped packets is slowly increasing while the device is in operation. I have tried different cables and different router ports before without any success. The device is currently connected via a managed switch and then to a trunk port on the router and I am still seeing the same behaviour on a VLAN interface (lan1.20): a slowly (10+ per hour or so) increasing number of dropped packets. Tried different ports on the switch.
The router is wrt3200acm running 22.03-SNAPSHOT and only a single physical port utilized (VLAN trunk), which is in turn connected to a managed switch. The cable tester on the managed switch shows no issues and I also tried different cables; no dropped packets reported on the switch either.
Is there a way to figure out why the packets get dropped? Is it possible that some network buffers overflow? This is a work laptop and it has always has VPN active, so I would like to eliminate the dropped packets of possible.

RX packets:1979825 errors:0 dropped:46 overruns:0 frame:0
2

Do the drops continue if you connect directly to the router? And can you see the dropped packets on the manager switch interface as well?

It’s possible they’re further upstream

3

Yes and No. iI am hoping that someone would suggest a way to tell how to identify the source and type of the dropped packets.

4

You can try running a wireshark capture and look for unusual activity around the time of packet drops.
That’s where I’d start

5

What should I be looking for in his case?

6

Dropped packets can have a lot of causes and there’s not a lot to go on here, getting a capture is the starting point