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Speeds peak and then crash and repeat. Seems to be the router


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Hi, thanks for reading this. Any help or tips will be greatly appreciated

I've had the same setup for quite some time and I've never had a problem until a few months ago, but I wasn't torrenting much so I ignored it. It's still happening and now it's really annoying. I start a single torrent and the speeds steadily climb and seem to act just fine, then it just crashes down to 0 and usually takes my internet down completely, meaning I can't browse and such on any of my computers when this happens. Then the speeds will pick up and it will act fine until it crashes again. This usually happens every 20 seconds on a bad day or every 2 minutes on a good day. I'll try to outline what I'm using and then explain what fixes I have tried so far.

My setup:

I have tested this on 2 computers, a windows XP and windows 7. The XP computer is a little old, but still runs well and the windows 7 computer is pretty new. XP is using utorrent 2.2.1 and windows 7 was using 2,0.1, but I just upgraded it to the newest (3.1.3) and it still won't work. I have cable internet through a smaller offshoot company of AT&T (I think) and I'm using a motorola SB5120 sufboard cable modem with a Linksys WRT54gs router. Both computers connect wirelessly (WPA protected) due to crappy placement of the modem port in my apartment. Most of my neighbors are older and my speeds are pretty consistent. I've used speedtest.net and I usually get around 7,000 kb/s DL and 600 kb/s UL( usually get around 1 mb/s when downloading on a decent torrent). I have started using a VPN, but it doesn't have a big impact on my speeds and this problem occurs with and without it.

My fix attempts:

My most important discovery is that this doesn't happen when I'm connected directly to the modem and not using a router. In fact, after I connect to the modem directly and leave the router off for a while, the issues goes away for a very short time when I do reconnect to the router. I'm thinking the router may be shot or possibly there's a setting or old firmware that could be causing this?

I've read some of the stickies and guides around here and I've tried setting DL and UL bandwith caps to limit my speeds to almost nothing. I've disabled DHT, Upnp, and Nat-pmp. I've set the maximum number of global connections to 100. I'm sure there are some other fixes I've attempted that have resulted in no change. Actually, when I disabled upnp and nat-pmp, it seemed to fix it, but I think that was just because I changed those after the router had been off for a while and it just appeared to fix it, because the problem is back.

I haven't made a lot of changes to my router since I bought it and I'll admit it's pretty old. I setup WPA secure wireless on it and I believe a disabled upnp through the router a long time ago because it was messing with my PS3 internet connections. I honestly can't remember if I changed the port that utorrent uses.

If anyone has any suggestions about what I can do to fix this, please let me know. I'm willing to accept that the router is just old and needs to be replaced, but I want to check with people who know what they're doing before I go out and speed money on a new router. Thanks for the help.

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I don't think I have. I'll try that now.

I apologize if this is stupid, but I'm not sure how to turn it off. When I log into the router and go to the firewall tab, I'm presented with these options:

Block Anonymous Internet Requests

Filter Multicast

Filter Internet NAT Redirection

Filter IDENT(Port 113)

All of them except filter NAT redirection are checked. Should I just uncheck all of them then try again?

Thanks

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I tried unchecking the boxes I mentioned for the router's firewall and I restarted the torrent. It got up to a healthy speed, as usual, then crashed within 20 seconds. I'm pretty sure the firmware is quite old on my router because I haven't upgraded it. Would upgrading the firmware possibly sort out this issue or is it a waste of time? Thanks.

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Please see the link below. It likely addresses your issue.

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=3456

Also, check to see how many simultaneous connections can be handled by your router at once. Additionally, you may want to check out the following link, which contains an alternate setting guide based on the max upload speed you are getting in a speedtest:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=58404

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Thank you very much for the reply. I read your comment and followed the first link and it takes me to a post that seems to say that I do need to upgrade my firmware on this router because it's causing a problem. However, the post says to go to another link for more instructions and when I click that one it doesn't say anything about the router firmware or anything related to the router. The link it send me to is: http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/incompatible-software which appears to be just a FAQ regarding incompatible software

Could you recheck that and make sure that is the right place I was supposed to go? I'm more than happy to upgrade my firmware to fix this if I can figure out which firmware I should use and why it's a problem. So if anyone can tell me what firmware to upgrade my router to and possibly provide some information on how to do it, that would be great.

I'm also reading the speed guide you sent and it looks like I'm adhering to the recommendations for the most part. I did a speed test through utorrent to set it up recently. However, I will go adjust a few things and see if that helps. Thanks.

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Heh, I can do that. Thanks. i was more curious about the first link you sent me to. It seems like it should have more details about how to update the firmware to a third party (DD-WRT and such) and suggests some modifications and scripts that should be run, but when I go to the link (http://utorrent.com/faq/incompatible-software#faq7) it just takes me to the usual FAQ. Is the link broken? If I can't find a way to view that link and get suggestions about DD-WRT or other third party firmwares, do you think I should just try and update my firmware to the newest from linksys? Maybe they have since included a fix for the routers getting overwhelmed by connections, but I may be optimistic with that hope. Thanks for the help.

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So I updated the firmware on my router (WRT54GS v.5) with the newest firmware from linksys for that model (1.52 I think). I figured I would give that a try before switching to DD-WRT because the site said it's harder to go back to original after that. My downloading seems to work a lot better. When I start a torrent, it speeds up as usual and still seems to drop a few times in the beginning, but it doesn't go completely to 0 and it doesn't crash my internet anymore. After a couple of big dips, it seems to even out and I get good consistent speeds now. I'm not sure why it dips in the beginning, but this is still way better than before and I can deal with it. So thanks for the help and advice

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