BitTorrent crashing my router

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justapix

Weaksauce
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Jan 14, 2005
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I've got a netgear wireless B router at home, MR814 (aka MR814v1), and I run a BitTorrent program on it called Azureus. I have Azureus set at stock settings except I lowered the max upload limit

The router is using the latest firmware update.

When I'm getting really good speed from BitTorrent sometimes around 250Kb I will come back and see that my router has crashed, I'll reset the router and she will start plugging along again, I do notice that the router is pretty hot at this point not sure if that has anything to do with it or not...
Also at other times it has crashed was not there to trouble shoot, possibly the same problem,
Also wondering if it is just the number of connections that is crashing my router and not the actual speed that my router is pulling that is doing it, the former seems more likely

What I was wondering is how many people have this problem, and if anyone can point me in the direction of a good wireless router that can handle this kind of load on it with out the router blowing up.

Thanks a lot
justapix
 
Check out the DSLReports form.

People using the Linksys WRT54G had the same problem. It was the firewall which keeps logs on unclosed TCP connections (mostly caused by Bit Torrent) for 5 days. The logs get so big that is sucks your system resources and causes new connections to not open. Those users fixed it with a 3rd party firmware flash and edited their startup script so the firewall log is limited to a certain size.

There might be a similar solution for you brand router.
 
That very well could be the problem, but this seems to happen almost every couple of hours depending on what type of speeds i'm getting...

that seems pretty quick for it being a log overflow problem
 
I have the exact same router and the exact same problem. I have not been able to find a solution that works. I'm thinking about replacing it with an old 550MHz PC and Smoothwall. What routers are people using that doesn't have this problem?
 
Linksys BEFSR41 and I have never had this problem. It has not been powered down in over 4 months.

Brian Taylor
 
BrianTaylor said:
Linksys BEFSR41 and I have never had this problem. It has not been powered down in over 4 months.

Brian Taylor
Click to expand...

Really thats awesom I've got some question then, I'm curious if you pretty much run the bitTorrent protocol non-stop?

well at least for days at a time, also what program are u running if you do, and how many connection at one time do u allow, for both up and down stream.

Now a more general question does anyone else have any other routers to recommend?

thanks a lot
justapix
 
justapix said:
I've got a netgear wireless B router at home, MR814 (aka MR814v1), and I run a BitTorrent program on it called Azureus. I have Azureus set at stock settings except I lowered the max upload limit

The router is using the latest firmware update.

When I'm getting really good speed from BitTorrent sometimes around 250Kb I will come back and see that my router has crashed, I'll reset the router and she will start plugging along again, I do notice that the router is pretty hot at this point not sure if that has anything to do with it or not...
Also at other times it has crashed was not there to trouble shoot, possibly the same problem,
Also wondering if it is just the number of connections that is crashing my router and not the actual speed that my router is pulling that is doing it, the former seems more likely

What I was wondering is how many people have this problem, and if anyone can point me in the direction of a good wireless router that can handle this kind of load on it with out the router blowing up.

Thanks a lot
justapix
Click to expand...
Holy crap I have the same exact router and the same exact problem... The only difference is that I have been thinking the problem stems from my cable modem. When running a bunch of torrents at once my internet connection dies (i am still able to access other pc's on the lan). I reset the cable modem (which looks fine, all led's indicate everything is OK) and everything starts working again. But now you have me thinking it might have something to do do with the router...next time it happens I will try reseting the router instead.
 
I used to have the same problem with a Linksys wireless-b router. I run ABC as a torrent client 24/7 that was causing it to crash repeatedly. I replaced it with a Microsoft one (built by Netgear) that did the same thing, but less frequently. I eventually gave up and turned an old P2 350 MHz box into a Smoothwall. No problems since.

If you want to keep the same router, I'd reccommend setting up a fan to blow on it. If that doesn't work you can try taking the top off and letting it sit in open air. Overall I'd reccommend a Smoothwall if you have an extra PC hanging around or a new WRT54G if you have the money, but fans or tossing a small heatsink on there would probably help it.

Hope this helps.
 
most solid state simple wifi/firewall/routers like the wrt54g and MR814 only support ~256 open connections trough the firewall
normal 10x more than would ever be needed in a SOHO environment
BT on a larger torrent can easily have over 1000 open
this makes the router with its limited resources go EEEP and die... just like your finding
the 2 best ways of dealing with this are:
1. p2 450 with somothwall, that can easily deal with 10k+ connections
2. set a machine up for BT only with a good internal firewall and set up the router to put the machine in the DMZ zone. so it will not touch anything going in or out of it.
 
These issues seem to be mostly caused by buggy firmware that cause the router to croak when there are too many concurrent connection going through them. Go the the vendors site, and download, and install the latest firmware version into your router.
 
justapix said:
Now a more general question does anyone else have any other routers to recommend?
Click to expand...
I've used two routers in the past few years which were able to handle BT (even over 10 BT windows open at the same time) without issues:

486DX2-66
16 MB EDO RAM
2 3Com ISA NICs
3.5" FDD

P166 MMX
32 MB RAM
Digital PCI NIC
RealTek-based PCI NIC
3.5" FDD

Both running Coyote Linux. With some effort you can make them passively cooled and virtually silent (except when booting from the single FD).

Modern SOHO routers must be really crappy if even a 12 year old PC and a stripped down, customized version of Linux can beat them without breaking a sweat :p
 
Elledan said:
Modern SOHO routers must be really crappy if even a 12 year old PC and a stripped down, customized version of Linux can beat them without breaking a sweat :p
Click to expand...

eh... that old box is still more robust than any soho router.
edit... well i take that back. current versions of the wrt54g use a 200 MHz cpu and 16 MB of ram.

bottom line is that soho routers are not designed to handle the sort of network activity that occurs with bittorrenting. i was dissapointed that my wrt54g was not up to snuff (tried three different firmware versions). perhaps version 2.2 wasn't up to the others, or perhaps i was unlucky. i think my problems were with overheating, but i'm not 100% sure. i'm not going to crack it open and stick a big fan on it anyways.
 
I used to have a dedicated pc running as a router, but now I need to support wireless pc's as well...
 
tiebird321 said:
2. set a machine up for BT only with a good internal firewall and set up the router to put the machine in the DMZ zone. so it will not touch anything going in or out of it.
Click to expand...
I am not exactly sure how that would work....

With my limited understand of networking, are you saying that the BT computer would still be connected to the router but in the DMZ?

Doesn’t that lead to the same problem of the router failing because it can Not maintain over 400 connections at once? Because the router is still the choke point in the system, it still receives more connections than it can handle that is why it crashes, you haven't removed it from the system as far as I can see.
 
Through my BEFSR41 I have left Azureus open for days at a time. I usually allow 100 download connections and 3 upload connections per torrent, and have had up to 10 torrents open at a time.

Brian Taylor

I have done the same with a Cisco SOHO-91, but that is a slightly higher class of device.
 
korpse said:
I used to have a dedicated pc running as a router, but now I need to support wireless pc's as well...
Click to expand...
Isn't that what wireless access points are for? There's no need for it to be built into the router itself.
 
justapix said:
I am not exactly sure how that would work....

With my limited understand of networking, are you saying that the BT computer would still be connected to the router but in the DMZ?

Doesn’t that lead to the same problem of the router failing because it can Not maintain over 400 connections at once? Because the router is still the choke point in the system, it still receives more connections than it can handle that is why it crashes, you haven't removed it from the system as far as I can see.
Click to expand...
By placing a system in the DMZ, the router will have less work managing the connections between this system and the outside world, so in a select number of cases it should help compensate for bottlenecks in a particular router.
 
tiebird321 said:
most solid state simple wifi/firewall/routers like the wrt54g and MR814 only support ~256 open connections trough the firewall
normal 10x more than would ever be needed in a SOHO environment
BT on a larger torrent can easily have over 1000 open
this makes the router with its limited resources go EEEP and die... just like your finding
Click to expand...

If tiebird321 is right about the 256 connections if I limited the # of connection to on my BT client to about 240 I should run into no problems correct?

i guess I’ll try that for right now...
 
Elledan said:
Isn't that what wireless access points are for? There's no need for it to be built into the router itself.
Click to expand...
Yea excpet I don't have an access point lying around, and its not worth buying one. I'd rather just spend the cash on a WRTG54.
 
I have a Westell Versalink router/modem from Verizon dsl. I noticed after a while that my Azureus would cause it to reset, and more often while running peerguardian at the same time. I changed to ABC, so that's my bt client now. No problems
 
Infina said:
I have a Westell Versalink router/modem from Verizon dsl. I noticed after a while that my Azureus would cause it to reset, and more often while running peerguardian at the same time. I changed to ABC, so that's my bt client now. No problems
Click to expand...

You said u use ABC; do u know what your settings are for it?

The people who say they use a different BitTorrent Client with no problem, I wonder if it just that by default that the number of connects allowed simultaneously is with in the limits of a SOHO router to handle.

I'm curious what other people’s settings are on there BitTorrent client now.

Also I wonder if part of the reason Azureus gives people so much trouble is because it runs in a Java Machine...

justapix
 
justapix said:
Infina:

You said u use ABC; do u know what your settings are for it?

The people who say they use a different BitTorrent Client with no problem, I wonder if it just that by default that the number of connects allowed simultaneously is with in the limits of a SOHO router to handle.

I'm curious what other people’s settings are on there BitTorrent client now.

Also I wonder if part of the reason Azureus gives people so much trouble is because it runs in a Java Machine...

justapix
Click to expand...
I have the problem using bitcomet.
 
Yeah the Java thing took up way too much mem while running + the actual Az client. My settings are normal for ABC. Max ul = 10. I have DSL, so I have 15k ul when dling, unlimited when I'm not. My router firewall is off. Min port = 4240, max = 4250. Hm that's about it. Let me know if you need more info.
 
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