Active frequency drift islanding detection method is one of most widely used in the distributed generator islanding detection. Now domestic researches of islanding detection have not been done deep researched about the reason why islanding detection method will become invalid. Therefore, the paper analyses the performances of the frequency drift islanding method from load phase frequency characteristic and algorithm phase frequency characteristic, which are the major factors affecting the effectiveness of islanding detection method. At last, this paper proved the analysis results with MATLAB.