Those of you who use torrents and do some heavy P2P sharing know that many routers cant handle alot of simultaneous connections or they 'melt down' and need to be reset. I'm looking for more info & benchmarking results for wireless & wired routers, similar to these two links:
Wrong. The chart is from a review of small wireless routers and lists the number of simultaneous *WIRELESS* connections that can be handled. That's basically the number of MAC addresses that can be bridged via wireless before the access point section dies.
What Bittorent and others do is open a huge number of simultaneous IP ports which causes the router to run out of buffer space. That's quite different than running out of table space for MAC addresses.
Blah. Anecdotal guesswork. Some of the reports couldn't even get the hardware and firmware versions correct.
Yes. However most of the crap I've read is no better than the above article. Basically, they make no effort to do any form of organized testing. Never mind that Microsoft has had a Bittorrent simulator for a while. Test first, then publish.
The basic problem is NOT that the router can't handle the large number of streams. It's that the users P2P software configuration allows a larger number of streams than the router can easily handle. If the software was configured for an infinite number of streams (as some clients are by default), the even the worlds best router doesn't have enough RAM to handle all the required buffer space. Reduce the number of streams and connections the software can accept and all but the most gutless router will handle the load.
MS Bittorrent simulator:
Analyzing and Improving BitTorrent Performance
Some Observations on BitTorrent Performance
File Swarming Systems
On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 04:57:34 GMT, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :
Much depends on the client. Azureus , one of the best Bittorrent clients, has reasonable defaults for the number of connections:
'Course there might still be a problem if multiple computers behind the router are running Azureus at the same time. ;)
Regardless, it's simply sloppy development and programming that results in routers falling over due to too many connections. Proper engineering would determine the maximum safe number of connections, and enforce that maximum gracefully, reasonably allocating and expiring connections by connected client.
Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.