Router issues

Submitted by chertel on Fri, 06/29/2012 - 12:57
Forums: 
Soulseek General Discussion

Hello.

Whenever I start the soul seek client, everything is fine for a while. But after about 15 minutes (which usually includes searching for some files and downloading/uploading files), my router starts having some problems. Current (already started) file transfers continue successfully, but I can no longer browse websites. I think it is a DNS issue, but I am not positive.

Any ideas?

I am using a Linksys WRT54G router with dd-wrt installed.

Thanks.

Submitted by Nir on Fri, 06/29/2012 - 14:18.

Searches that return a lot of results do open a very large number of TCP connections. If your router can't handle it, it may very well choke. The only thing I can suggest is better targeted searches, a different router, or different router firmware. Personally I had a lot of problems with dd-wrt, although that was a long time ago. My D-Link router almost never chokes.

Submitted by chertel on Fri, 06/29/2012 - 17:43.

So to solve your issues with dd-wrt, did you get a new router? New firmware? Which D-Link router do you use?

I have been thinking of abandoning my router or getting a different firmware (i.e. not dd-wrt), but I don't really know where to start (looked at tomato, but that's about it). I have had the same router for like 8 years :)

On the other hand, let's say I stay with my crummy router:
-is my searching the probable cause of problems (or can people looking at my share cause problems? I have about 25000+ files shared, so I get frequent "file found")
-is there a way to limit how many connections the search tries to open?
-when this happened to you, was a router restart the only solution, or is there something else I can do? (usually the router administration page craps out too)

Thanks for your input and all your hard work on Soulseek!

Submitted by Nir on Fri, 06/29/2012 - 19:16.

If I remember correctly there was no way at the time to go back from dd-wrt. I've been using a D-Link DIR-655 for the last few years, I got it simply because it was the best rated Wi-Fi router on Amazon at the time. The newer model (Extreme-N) isn't as highly rated, and I don't know if it would do as well with lots of simultaneous TCP connections.

The searching is most likely the cause of your problems. Nothing else the Soulseek client does is as network intensive. There's no real way to programmatically limit the number of connections opened for receiving search results because there's no differentiation between one type of P2P connection and another. If you stopped accepting new P2P connections, you'd also sabotage your client's ability to process file transfers and prevent all other general P2P traffic. In retrospect it would have been better to assign a separate listening port just for receiving search results, much like SoulseekQt does for obfuscated P2P traffic, in which case you would be able to simply deny new connections on that port past a point. But something like that would be hard to implement properly at this point, and there's no guarantee that even the preliminary traffic of lots of other clients trying to open new connections to you won't bring your router down.

In my experience only restarting the router worked. Sorry I can't be of any more help.

Thanks, Nir

Submitted by chertel on Mon, 07/02/2012 - 21:07.

Thanks man, appreciate the info.

Keep up the good work on soulseek, been using it since like 2003.

Submitted by Nir on Mon, 07/02/2012 - 22:18.

Cheers, thanks!