Aren't routers suppose to load balance bandwidth?

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1337h4x0r

Weaksauce
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Aug 12, 2009
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I have a D-Link DSL 2640B on the way which I plan on using to replace my 2Wire modem. The 2640B is a combination of a modem/wireless device. Out of curiosity, does anyone know if it dynamically load balances the internet connection? Sometimes while I'm playing online games on my PC and a few others are using the internet for browsing or Youtube, I lag A LOT. Latency shoots up from 10 to 200. QoS goes to ****. And I only need 0.50-1Mbps to keep a steady online play. This was the problem with my 2Wire. So does the 2640B load balance the bandwidth?

Our max speed is 3.5Mbps according to the ATT Rep.
 
Lots of things could be going on here.

1) Anyone running any type of torrents at all?
2) It's a Dlink, not even a really high end Dlink, most your consumer grade stuff can't handle as much load as people think they can effectively.
3) Max speed means nothing, what is your true sustained speed up and downstream, ie, not what your providers says as, "Up to <speed X>," but what is it really.
4) Your home routers don't really load balance as much as more intelligently route packets between ports, some have QoS packet scheduling but you do need to configure it.
 
Lots of things could be going on here.

1) Anyone running any type of torrents at all?
Nah, they're just your casual computer users who still believe in Frostwire. And if they are downloading, its most likely just music.

2) It's a Dlink, not even a really high end Dlink, most your consumer grade stuff can't handle as much load as people think they can effectively.


3) Max speed means nothing, what is your true sustained speed up and downstream, ie, not what your providers says as, "Up to <speed X>," but what is it really.

According to speedtest:
Ping - 44ms
Upload - 0.43Mbps
Download - 2.42Mbps

This is all based on wireless connection btw. I do wired connection for online gaming, but I don't have access to it at the moment.

So should I just get another router? I don't have the option to switch plans right now.

4) Your home routers don't really load balance as much as more intelligently route packets between ports, some have QoS packet scheduling but you do need to configure it.
 
1337h4x0r said:
Lots of things could be going on here.
1)
Nah, they're just your casual computer users who still believe in Frostwire. And if they are downloading, its most likely just music.

2)
According to speedtest:
Ping - 44ms
Upload - 0.43Mbps
Download - 2.42Mbps

This is all based on wireless connection btw. I do wired connection for online gaming, but I don't have access to it at the moment.

So should I just get another router? I don't have the option to switch plans right now.
Click to expand...

Frostwire is a torrent client. Torrent clients can be notorious for bring an inexpensive home router to it's knees with the shear number of incoming and outgoing connections they make. Running two computers on my home network if I let torrents go full bore my wife looks over at me and tells me to stop downloading, it's ruining her WoW experience.

I never trust speed test. Some ISP's have been known to cache speed test results to get you a better than reality picture.

Don't forget you're only looking at about 50KB/sec upload and 300KB/sec download after the bits to bytes conversion of speeds. 4 computers running network intensive apps can saturate that fairly quickly. 420P hulu videos, if you want a consist performance I've read it recommended at least 1.5Mbps for one stream for flawless playback. I can't imagine multiple streams trying if this is the case.

You may be connection limited as well. There's no easy diagnostic.
 
From the specs it seems that the D-link offers some sort of load balancing. I don't know how well it works or the depth that you can customize it.

I know that the Asus RT-N16 and N12 routers (& probably others) have a load balancing feature that works pretty decent and it also allows for a higher number of connections than many routers. But what you really want is DD-WRT or Tomato which offers 4096 max connections and many other features that regular router firmware just can't match. You need a compatible router for this.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices
 
I currently use a Buffalo WHR-G54S. It's been with me for nearly 5 years. Completely reliable. I've gone through several Netgear and two D-Link routers before the Buffalo.

Netgear kept failing a lot even with one completely dying three months after purchase. That was with medium network usage.

D-Link had shoddy firmware and D-Link would even go so far to stop updating them after a year. The last D-Link router I had came with a rather bad firmware. Even after updating it, my logs on the router would continuously see dropped packets and various TCP attacks. That's with SPI and firewall enabled. DMZ was of course disabled. It's probably the worse consumer firmware I've seen so far.

I now run toastman Tomato custom firmware (Tomato Firmware v1.28.7625 -Toastman-ND ND Std) on the WHR-G54S. It's better than DD-WRT due to one fact-- DD-WRT only allows a max of 4096 connections. And, when you're downloading from torrents, that will get maxed out pretty quickly. At that point, you drop connections or web traffic slows to a crawl.

With the toastman Tomato mod, I get 8192 connections max. It's been very reliable. The firmwares in regular routers including my AT&T U-verse Gateway, just plain suck and aren't that reliable (especially the ones I've had). They cannot handle many connections and do not load balance very well. The DD-WRT and Tomato custom firmwares have extensive QoS options that will help there.

The catch is finding a compatible router and knowing how to flash a vanilla router with a custom firmware. Make one mistake and can risk bricking the router.

I plan on switching to a pfSense custom router within the next few months, which should be even more reliable than what I currently have.
 
octoberasian hit the nail on the head, its most likely the number of connections that's dragging your internet.
 
Just use a modem and a router. Modem/Router combos usually are pieces of garbage anyways. I have my 2Wire in bridged mode to my Mikrotik router, no problems at all. (The MT does load balancing and failover, btw) Haven't had to reset my modem once in over a year.
 
octoberasian said:
I It's better than DD-WRT due to one fact-- DD-WRT only allows a max of 4096 connections. And, when you're downloading from torrents, that will get maxed out pretty quickly. At that point, you drop connections or web traffic slows to a crawl.

With the toastman Tomato mod, I get 8192 connections max.
Click to expand...

when is the last time you went over 4000 concurrent connections on your home network, and in what alternate dimention is that buffalo router able to handle nearly that many?

i do agree though that the OP's problem is probably torrenting hogging open sockets or overall bandwidth. normal routers have connection limits in the lower hundreds because they arent powerful enough to handle more. with a few people running torrents, you could easily use more than a few hundred connections. however a decent estimate of number of connections used by bittorrent is around 50 to 150 per active torrent (you can manually set this number in the torrent client program, standard limit is something like 200 global connections per computer/client).

so to use 8000 connections, you would need 5 or more people (who manually changed the connection count limits in bittorrent) downloading 20 or more active torrent all at the same time. that is not realistic usage for a residential internet connection.
 
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