WRT54GL not good enough?

Bozebo

Bozebo

Bozebo

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Joined
10 Oct 2008
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Hi, I am trying to use a WRT54GL to serve as our wired router. Generally it works nicely for a while (better than the one built into the adsl2+ modem thing).

But after about a day of running it just completely dies, even restarting it isn't usually enough because it doesn't seem to bother clearing the active connections (thousands of them) and just kills it's memory instantly on startup. I have to unplug it and wait about 5 minutes then plug it back in for it to clear the connections, also I must plug out lan devices in 1 at a time so it doesn't collapse.

We have 7 people in this house, each of us with a main desktop and some of us with xboxes/ps3s and laptops etc. Basically there are no home routers designed to cope with this. But the WRT54GL (flashed with openwrt) can barely support 3 devices, wtf! I noticed that with my one computer plugged in, there are over 200 TCP connections on the active connections list, yet windows only lists about 20 in netstat, what is going on? Why isn't the router freeing up the connections when they are no longer in use? Also it seems to have connections from LAN ips which are simply not connected.; Wireless off, only my pc connected with IP 192.168.1.177 yet it has lots of connections from other people's computers which are not physically plugged in, the stupid thing is remembering them and running out of ram.

If I go to the system>processes page the total memory usage is something like 180% (if I add up the values in the memory usage column), or is that the % of memory allocated to the process that it is using? Also strangely all processes use exactly "13%" except one on 8% (dnsmasq) and one on 25% (luci).

What is going on, is my router being an idiot or is it just unnable to handle the load?

system>system page:
System: Broadcom BCM5352 chip rev 0
Processor: BCM3302 V0.8
Load: 0.00, 0.04, 0.05
Memory: 14.01 MB (33% cached, 9% buffered, 12% free)
Local Time: Sun May 31 11:53:08 2009 (no way to manually enter this)
Uptime: 00h 19min 17s
Click to expand...

Can anyone help? We are getting fibre in a few months and will probably need a beastly router, but until then I want to actually be able to go online :(
 
Flippant answer: Try Tomato firmware instead.

In my experience it coped OK with ~5 fairly heavy users with p2p in the mix.
 
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As wush said, WRTs are awesome routers once you put third party firmware on there. I found DD-WRT too bloated for 'heavy' use, but Tomato or better yet Victek's Tomato Mod will see you right. Victek basically took Tomato and added speedmod, and some contrack and routing tweaks to sustain thousands of connections (P2P, gaming etc) properly.
 
I use dd wrt and once installed you have to change the connection time out and the max connections option in the settings. You can up the clock speed to 216 Mhz as well. I've never had an issue with it since then.
 
Flash tomato. Either 1.27 if you need the dual mac or raf mod (better) http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=62248 .

Change the timeouts to these
2dume75.png


and you're done. The official firmware has a timeout of 5 days, which is honestly useless :)

whitecrook said:
You can up the clock speed to 216 Mhz as well.
Click to expand...

A plus of the raf mod is it lets you set whatever you want, although you should stick to the chips frequencies really. 250Mhz is the highest they natively support (i.e. stable with no added cooling) but pass that and you'd better have a jtag cable handy. Not sure why linksys shipped them at 200/216 really.
 
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For one user with a low number of connections and minimal qos ten yes it'll handle a 50 meg line but not well. They were never really intended for anything other adsl and struggle under moderate load at 25meg, at 250mhz torrents will make them sluggish ~ 15meg.

If there's really 7-14 devices then a couple firewall scripts to cap connections will keep it stable. Although for fiber at that load the RT-N16 if the go too but that tomato is still a beta http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=63587 .
 
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