How do you know when your router can't handle torrents?

I've got a V5 WRT54G and everyone always said they sucked for Torrents.

It was true on my satellite connection (1.5/256) as even one torrent would KILL the network but now that I'm on 6Mb Comcast I can torrent away and surf.

What's the deal?

has nothing to do with the router...its the amount of bandwidth you have, and 6mb is ok

Actually the router can be effected by the torrent traffic. When doing NAT it has to keep track of all the states being created when you connect to another host, each of those states uses up a bit of memory and if you connect to to many hosts you can actually overload the router and fill up the memory.

Mine would run out of memory, because it would stoe firewall states fro 5 DAYS after last activity. It would run fine, then traffic would slow down until it died usually 2 days or so after last reboot.

Some routers just cannot handle all the connections. Usually the cure is to limit the number of connections via your torrent client if you are indeed having issues (besides just your bandwidth, Sat. is horrible for torrents and such as there is very little bandwidth and very large latency).

O, and you will know since your internet will just die. I have overloaded a few routers even with my crappy 512/128 DSL. I now use smoothwall though so no more issues

You can probably download items faster, thus your router is not working for as long, the more torrents, = more connections from others and many consumer routers die after a while.

or you possibly turned off sharing, that is what bring most routers down is the upload.

IntelOwnz said:

has nothing to do with the router...its the amount of bandwidth you have, and 6mb is ok

Click to expand...

Actually it does have lots to do with the router. P2P traffic utilizes many concurrent connections. Each connection uses RAM in the router. Lower grade routers have very little RAM, and slow CPUs. The wrt54g series is already rather light in this area, and the "version 5" is a crippled joke...an ultra cheap version well known for being horrible performance wise.

You can take a cheap router and put it on a 1 meg connection...attempt P2P traffic..and the router can still crumble and be the bottleneck.

you know your router cant handle it when your using 1/3 of your bandwith on torrents and it takes 30 sec for goggle to load.
easy solution is to take and old computer and put Monowall on it. then you shoulnt have a problem with slowdowns. Or just limit the number of connections BT has.