[sealednectar]

Noob alert!

Hi guys, my first post. I have a WRT54GL, purchased it so I could put DD-WRT on it. The installation went fine, however I have this go "sluggish" issue that I have spent 2 days trying to figure out. I have read up everything on the internet about it and still no joy.

My router is v1.1 on DD-WRT v24-sp2 (10/10/09) mini build 13064
Setup= PC --(wifi)--> Router -> Zyxel DSL Modem -> Internet


What happens is I can use the internet normally and its very fast, then I wanted to download torrent of raspberry pi raspian os and suddenly everything went slow, read up on it and did everything here : http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Router_Slowdown

but nothing changed, it seems every time I reboot it all goes fine, I am not happy with the fact that this router cannot handle a single torrent, and it doesnt seem right, since the number of connections never exceeds 500, the ram is plenty, the cpu is mostly idle.

So I tried setting max connections to 1024, 300, 120 and even 1024, 120, 120. Still happens. In fact the number of connections never reach that, one minute at 500 connections the router is giving me 700Kb/s and the next its down to 50Kb/s with the same number of connections, and everything runs slow, the UI, pings suddenly take from 1-2ms, to 7000ms.

telnet, nvram erase, reboot, and everything back to normal.

I watched the processes using top command, everything seemed fine, when the slowness happened there was about 3mb free ram (compared to 4.3 on restart) and the CPU was not being over utilized, so if that's the case, and the no of connections is all good, then I do not understand what's wrong with it.

I even tried pinging from a separate wireless device, next to the router, and even that was giving pings of over 500ms, which means the router was facing a slowdown and not the PC.

Another thing I monitored was the PC's connection to the router, using wavemon, it remains stable and good.

Now I am not really interested in the torrent, but I want to make the router able to handle such a situation. So I turn the torrent off to see the routers reaction, and everything speeds back up, but not quite, pings remain higher by a ms, so about 3ms now. And things remain a bit sluggish forever until a restart is done, even though now the number of connections, is 50.

What's even stranger is, I did a test a couple of days ago, and remember the router was able to download almost 1.5gb constantly at 700Kb/s (until the files downloaded), one was a torrent, and the other a linux .iso image. So I do not think its an overheating issue, as it would have definitely got hot then.

I know next to nothing about networking, linux, or dd-wrt. Please if someone could help me find out why this is happening, or point me to the tools I need to use.

Thank you.

[wouter]

At first you should have read to through the announcements of this forum.
Do not use the 13064 build.
The 14929 build is still recommended, I suggest the mini generic build.
You can find it here:
ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2010/08-12-10-r14929/broadcom/
Or the direct download link:
ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2010/08-12-10-r14929/broadcom/dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic.bin

Try that build and test your setup again.

In general be aware that the WRT54GL is quite outdated according todays "standards". It is quite an old design with rather slow CPU, lack of memory and only 802.11G. The performance cannot be compared with any more modern router. I would say it is good enough for generic Internet browsing, not much more.

I use my old WRT54GL with the 14929 mini generic build to connect a network printer.
I let it scheduled reboot every night (Administration>Keep Alive), this way it works for almost 4 years now.