'Should' and 'will' are two different matters. I used a Stick in my living room and it annoyed the crap out of me, even though it was only 18' from the router but after moving it to a bedroom, there's no longer a TV blocking the RF and it works much better.
When I moved the Stick to the bedroom and the Roku XD to the living room, the XD's performance was terrible, although it wasn't great before. Then, they stopped supporting the XD and other models and the wheels really fell off- it would stop during streaming, exit to the home screen and restart frequently. I did a speed test with my phone using WiFi and the phone performed fine, but the Roku showed 8Mbps on the screen for network info, so I bought a Roku Premiere yesterday, hoping that it was just a matter of a piece that was old and basically obsolete. It was- the Premiere shows much higher speed and works beautifully. The reaction speed of button presses is almost instantaneous; using the FF & REW buttons with YouTube work extremely well and the old unit was terrible in that respect.
It's annoying, but if anyone has problems with their Roku, look on their site and see if your unit is obsolete. The Premiere is only $39.99.