I have a nice little mini-LAN in the house with 4 machines in the basement, 2 machines in the office, a laptop for the wife, etc, etc. 2 of the machines in the basement are mythtv boxes, so they do multimedia streaming. Everything in the house that can be is on Gigabit, and I'm using USR 8 port Gigabit switches. I was using a DI-524, but I want to stream multimedia to the bedroom and it's inconvenient to wire that room, so I was looking at a wireless bridge, N variety. This means, I need an N wireless AP. So, I tried the WRT-610, and the DIR-825. I have had better luck with the DIR-825, so I stuck with it.
However, sometime later I noticed that the DIR-825 seems to somehow be throttling my LAN traffic. I was noticing this when I would use dvbstream from a machine in the basement to multicast clear QAM on my LAN. Then I can use TSReader in the office to receive and "decode" and watch the streams via VLC. Under normal conditions, that all works just great.
However, when I plug the DIR-825 into my switch (I have SB5120 <==> DIR-825 <==> Switch, and everything else is connected to the switch.) my LAN throughput goes way down. Last night I downloaded and installed a copy of Objectplanet's Network Probe, and verified what I was feeling. When I disconnect the router from the switch, network probe is showing lan throughput of 40+ Megabits/second. As soon as I connect the router to the switch, throughput drops to 10 Megabits/second or less.
I have tried enabling/disabling QOS, traffic shaping and multicast streams. None of those settings seems to have any affect on LAN throughput (I wouldn't expect them to anyway, since this is all local, not going out to the cloud.)
Has anyone else seen this, and/or have any recommendations as to what to do to fix it, other than to go back to my DI-524 which didn't seem to have the issue?