Benefit of a second router?

[Sgraffite]

I have both a Netgear FVS318 and a Buffalo WHR-G54S.

Right now I'm just using my Buffalo router (flashed with dd-wrt) for everything, so the Netgear is collecting dust. We have renters in the basement who use the wireless. The problem is if I download torrents it slows down everybody's internet. I've tried tweaking the settings for the Buffalo router but no matter what I do torrents still bog down the network.

Would I be able to gain any performance by using some combination of the routers that would prevent the network slowdown for everyone else when I'm downloading? Would I be able to benefit in other ways by making use of both routers?

 

[kdheads]

if your refering to internet browsing being slow, then a 2nd router is not going to resolve the issue.

To resolve the issue with the slowdowns, you will need to limit the bandwidth of your torrent application. There should be some sort of option for this in the program. The torrents are eating up all the bandwidth supplied to you by your isp, thus causing all others to be slow when trying to browse or do anything on the net

 

[BobSutan]

if your refering to internet browsing being slow, then a 2nd router is not going to resolve the issue.

To resolve the issue with the slowdowns, you will need to limit the bandwidth of your torrent application. There should be some sort of option for this in the program. The torrents are eating up all the bandwidth supplied to you by your isp, thus causing all others to be slow when trying to browse or do anything on the net

That, or the BT traffic is overwhelming the router's resources (memory, packets per second, etc). Due to the vast amounts of sessions that can be in play, this isn't that uncommon for SOHO routers.

 

[Sgraffite]

I don't think bandwidth is the problem, I think it's the number of connections. Even downloaded at 50k/s will bog down the internet. If I just download a file from a web page I can get 500k/s and still surf just fine.

 

[Istario]

For bit torrent, bandwidth issues usually arise in the upload, not the download. Unless you have are connected to really good seeds (usually popular linux distros have some), you won't be maxing your download pipe. However, since your upload pipe is significantly smaller, it can fill up quickly if you don't have it limited. Here is a handy tool you can use to monitor bandwidth usage on a dd-wrt box. Try to stay well under your max upload if you don't want to slowdown everybody else.

It is also possible that you are running out of connections. This is easily fixed in administration/management tab of dd-wrt. Increase the maximum number of ports and decrease the timeouts. The help sections suggest increasing the number of ports to 4096 and decreasing both timeouts to 120 seconds. From the help screen: This is necessary to maintain router stability because peer-to-peer applications open many connections and don't close them properly.

 

[Sgraffite]

I've already increased the ports to 4096 and the decreased the timeouts to 90 seconds. I'll check out the link you suggested and see if that helps. Thanks!

 

[acee]

but back to the title which i would also like to know.. whats the benefit of having 2 routers? because i seen so many people post screens which they have 2-3 routers. I currently own 2 d-links and 1 linksys wireless but 1 of each dlink and linksys is sitting around doing nothing. If it can make a difference to have more than 1 router can tell what is it? Thanks

 

[BobSutan]

but back to the title which i would also like to know.. whats the benefit of having 2 routers? because i seen so many people post screens which they have 2-3 routers. I currently own 2 d-links and 1 linksys wireless but 1 of each dlink and linksys is sitting around doing nothing. If it can make a difference to have more than 1 router can tell what is it? Thanks

You only get a benefit from having multiple routers if you have multiple ISPs, and furthermore those ISPs must have load balancing enabled between your two lines/accounts. If you had maybe something like a Cisco router and two ISPs you might be able to emulate load balancing where the second line gets used if the first one gets saturated, but that's really about it unless there is logic enabled on the ISPs' end.

 

[RavenD]

I had this problem once. The majority of SOHO routers really arent robust enough for bittorrent traffic. Taking an old box (p2 era should easily be sufficient), and throwing something along the lines of IPCop or Endian on it, and setting up QoS, is a reliable fix to the problem.