@brichter45
When I had many roomates who all used P2P clients for a continued length of time, the huge number of open TCP/UDP connections caused the router to crash and hang for a few minutes then would soft reboot the router, but the soft reboot did not purge the RAM and it still would act very slow when do anything WAN oriented. A hard reboot was needed. This would happen after a few hours of P2P use and P2P client global connection limits were not by any means overwhelming. I've encountered it recently and side effects usually include the Wireless connections slow to a halt while wired continue to work acceptably well (but not as fast as a fresh boot). This is not an issue with Tomato under the same conditions.
I believed this to be the case from the router logs. Now, as of this past year, even without any P2P use, the router seems to hang and soft reboot every 36-48 hours without a discernable cause judging from the logs. This could also be a sign that my router hardware is dying (have had it for almost 2 years), but many others are experiencing this same problem and it seems to be 1.3X firmware related. Also I have had this issue before with stock Linksys firmware where it would hang and crash completely after 5 minutes instead of several hours.
Overall I expected more from a $100-$120 single band router that claims to have a faster CPU than comparable 700Mhz MIPS architecture, with enough horsepower to do realtime uplink packet scheduling. It should have had more than 16MB of RAM for this class of router, especially since it is one of the few equipped with a gigabit switch. Also, this is one of the few draft 2.0 router models that has stood the test of time and has received universal acclaim (compared to Linksys' 6 month support of their 11n routers before pulling the plug). Since Dlink publishes and quotes the 655's accolades on the retail box and its product website over the last two years, I would have hoped Dlink would have continued to support their product better by providing more functional fixes and patches to the 655 firmware rather than feature additions. They had a real opportunity to improve product integrity and brand loyalty of their SOHO products and possibly gain a decisive edge in that sector but overall I think they blew it with far too few firmware updates that overall helped with some issues but mostly did not fix them. This is such a shame to see, especially when non commercial 3rd party firmwares that have a multitude of different hardware configurations to manage and support, can perform so much faster and stabler and be able to provide enterprise features to the masses without the resources of a large dedicated team from a company like Dlink.
It seems like Dlink has a mentality that they won't bother to fix a P2P issue because P2P is largely used for piracy. Firmware writers should give people an option in the firmware to tweak the connection timeout that way both the end users win and Dlink wins by being able to say their firmware does not terminate a legitimate connection that was idle for a long period of time unless the user modifies a setting.
I know this is not an appropriate area to rant but it doesn't seem like there will be a fix for P2P crashing or any type of stability fix. I also believe that most people who own a 655 and have been experiencing problems really want to love their 655 because it is almost a perfect router but the firmware updates are not bailing them out. The point is, if 3rd party devs can do it with ease and without reservation, Dlink and others most certainly can as well.
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Topic: Do you recommend DIR-655? (Read 12732 times)