Over the past several years I have been following alot of open-source options to replace my linksys or dlink router’s factory firmware. I soon discovered dd-wrt as my best option and installed v21. I loved the simplicity of how their web-based admin works plus all the features they offer.
More recently I began to have serious problems with connecting to the internet. It started soon after I added a 7th home workstation to my home network. Yea I know, 7 computers is alot for a house but if you know anything about me, I’m a computer junkie. I have specific computers preforming tasks, running my security system, tvs, etc… My house is almost completely computer driven. But thats another topic for another day.
After adding my new computer I soon discovered that pages like Facebook, NewEgg.com, etc… would time out on every third or fourth click. I called Comcast thinking it was something with their system. But they ran speed test & line quality checks to verify everything was running smoothly. I even plugged my laptop directly into Comcast and did a speed test for my self and I downloaded well into the 28mb/s and uploaded well into the 7mb/s. After a few days of playing around with settings across my network, I soon discovered a little setting in my firewall/router called ‘Maximum Ports’ which set a max amount of TCP/IP connections into and out of my network. It was set to 512 but next to that was a small text that said default setting 4096. I thought to my self for a second and said oh well lets try changing it back to its default.
Instantly my internet speed across all machines returned to normal. After monitoring my router for a few minutes I noticed my active IP connections hovered around 800 sessions. Thus this simple setting was my bottleneck.
Apparently when I upgraded from the first version of DD-WRT, the original default setting was 512 but now they upgraded that to 4096. Regardless my wife & I are happy campers now with super fast internet.
What you can learn from this is that sometimes you just gotta try something totally unexpected and you might be surprised that the result actually works.
Best!