Wireless router random disconnects...

[Realityshift]

Ok so after finally having a good stable router for ... a month I have since broken up with my girlfriend and moved back in with my parents... leaving the router behind because im a nice guy, or stupid, one of the 2.

Anyways my parents are using a dlink WBR-2310, seems decent enough, and their running shaw high speed, 10mbps. The first day or so I had no issues, im in the same room as the router so im running off cat 5 and not wireless. Now the router randomly decides to stop all all connections at very random intervals and then start again. This lull period between restarts can be upwards of 5 minutes, and I know that its happening when I can watch my BTs download speeds slowly trickling down to 0, but I can still talk on MSN. Websites fail to load during this time as well, steam goes offline ect. It honestly feels like the router is getting over whelmed by the internet traffic but its honestly not high traffic, normally no more then 500kbs of bit torrents normally limited to 5 active torrents, some msn, and normal web browsing.

There is also nothing going on on the wireless 9 out of 10 times it goes down, it just fails. There is no set time frame as to when it goes down, could be every 30 mins, 10 mins, sometimes a couple hours. It is getting to be very frustration though, many times now it has costed me sources on my torrents causing them to fall well bellow their previous speeds.

Right now I have just recovered from a case of it and MSN refuses to reconnect...

I miss my linksys router already, plug it in, abuse the crap out of it, and not 1 single disconnect.

Any ideas from you network gurus?

[Perineum]

I'm guessing that the bittorrents are opening up ports and the routers timeout to close them isn't quick enough... eventually you run out of ports that you can open because you still have open but unused ports messing things up. Things like MSN will still work because it's using an established open port already. Your bittorrents meanwhile will slowly dwindle down to nothing as you stop downloading via one port with a peer and try to establish a new port with a different peer to get another piece of the file

This would be my guess. A router firmware upgrade will sometimes fix this. Bittorrent was hell on a lot of routers back in the day.

You should notice this more on torrents that have a lot of seeds/peers.

[Sagath]

Originally Posted by Perineum

I'm guessing that the bittorrents are opening up ports and the routers timeout to close them isn't quick enough... eventually you run out of ports that you can open because you still have open but unused ports messing things up. Things like MSN will still work because it's using an established open port already. Your bittorrents meanwhile will slowly dwindle down to nothing as you stop downloading via one port with a peer and try to establish a new port with a different peer to get another piece of the file

This would be my guess. A router firmware upgrade will sometimes fix this. Bittorrent was hell on a lot of routers back in the day.

You should notice this more on torrents that have a lot of seeds/peers.

+1.

Either that, or your router is ka-put. My old W54 worked fine over LAN, but as soon as I used a wireless connection off it, it would drop me randomly all over the place. I pitched it, bought a new D-Link and didnt have any issues. Randomly dropping wireless connections is a good sign the router is on its way out.

[stoanee]

I just switched from Telus to Shaw and my previously stable Dlink DIR-625 router is having continuous nervous breakdowns and a firmware update did not help. Shaw is clueless and of no help. I have some router settings that I will try as soon as I can get everybody OFF the computers. (they say I spend too much time on them but when they are not working properly I can't get them fixed fast enough..)

If this works I'll post the results.

[Realityshift]

Thanks for narrowing it down for me guys =) I did 1 firmware update but the newest beta update says that it addresses the timeout issues so I think im going to give that a try and see what happens.