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[Rocket Surgeon]

Sorry so long; trying to avoid a Q&A thread volley...

I recently picked up a DIR-655 B1 2.00NA and have had speed issues with P2P apps ever since. Basically, whether I am wireless or hardwired, apps like aMule and Transmission work _almost_ acceptably after a fresh router reboot but then speed begins to degrade within about an hour, finally slowing to a crawl and requiring another router reboot. Rinse and repeat.

A few points:

• I have reverted to factory defaults and started over multiple times.
• Port forwarding for the apps is setup correctly; this is the only reason they work reasonably well immediately after a reboot. (I have confirmed that the required ports are open and being used with a variety of utilities -- Wireshark, online port checkers, etc.)
• I've also tried the Virtual Server rules to no avail.
  
• Whenever P2P traffic is degraded, other traffic appears unaffected -- web browsing, streaming media through my Roku device, VoIP, all continue to work seemingly fine.
• The router logs show nothing of note with all logging options enabled -- no dropped packets, blocked connections, etc.
• I use a static IP on my Arch Linux computer where the P2P apps run.
• aMule begins with Hi ID, but drops to Lo ID within 30 mins.
• I am not running any firewall software after the router.
• I have toggled SPI, NAT endpoint filtering, QoS engine, DNS relay, traffic shaping in various permutations -- all with the same end result. As a last resort, I even tried the DMZ host option. Nope.
• Once more: The behavior is the same whether the PC is wired or wireless.
• My old WRT54G2 (R.I.P.) never had this problem with the same modem.

So, to isolate the behavior to the router and eliminate the possibility that it's my modem flaking out or my ISP shaping the traffic, I wired my PC directly to my modem. The comparative results:

Using Router
 aMule avg. D/L speed after 10 minutes: 98 kB/s
 aMule avg. D/L speed after 30 minutes: 255 kB/s
 aMule avg. D/L speed after 60 minutes: 46 kB/s

Direct to modem
 aMule avg. D/L speed after 10 minutes: 443 kB/s
 aMule avg. D/L speed after 30 minutes: 1.21 MB/s
 aMule avg. D/L speed after 60 minutes: 1.42 MB/s

I ran this test 2x to be sure. Same result.

Has anyone seen this behavior and, if so, did you resolve it? How?

Thanks for any help.

[Rocket Surgeon]

While I have found what looks like the solution, it's bittersweet at best ...

The Cause: The B1 2.00NA version of the DIR-655 does not seem to be capable of the same 200+ max simultaneous connections that the old A4 version was routinely reported to achieve.

The Solution: To effectively use apps that require lots of connections (such as aMule and other P2P apps), you need to dial down the max simultaneous connection settings ... dial them down by A LOT.

After fiddling around for half the day, I finally found the right balance between performance and stability: ~120 max simultaneous connections. If I push the router much beyond that, the performance crashes into the basement and a reboot is required to recover.

[Something else that seems to send this thing into a tailspin is too many new connections over a short period of time. If you're having a similar issue and the app you're using gives you control over the rate of new connections, try setting it to ~10 new connections / 5 secs.]

This really hacks me off, by the way. When I bought this router about 6 weeks ago, I did so specifically after reading about its excellent price vs. performance ratio for P2P use. Of course, all those reviews were for the A4. I didn't even think to consider a regression in the performance of the new version until today. (Silly me.)

So, while I was used to ~250 max simultaneous connections and an average 1.4 MB/s D/L speed on my old Linksys, I've "upgraded" to ~120 connections and an average D/L speed of 650 kB/s.