Last week I flashed my Linksys WRT54GL router with a 3rd party firmware DD-WRT v23 SP. The installation resolved my issues with the original Linksys firmware of not being able to surf the internet while downloading with bittorrent. However, I found connectivity was still a bit sluggish and at times it was difficult to access the DD-WRT web administration interface.

I found some performance tips related to router slowdown from the DD-WRT Wiki website, and implemented one of the solutions recommended on the page:

• Go to the Web-Admin and log in
• Go to 'Administration'
• Go to 'Management'
• Enter the following values at 'IP Filter Settings'
  • Maximum Ports: 4096
  • TCP Timeout (s): 3600 to 90 (decrease if you have many TCP connections)
  • UDP Timeout (s): 3600 to 90 (decrease if you have many UDP connections)

This weekend, I was assigned to do load testing from my home for a project at work. The load testing involved running with 10 to 20 users, with each user running 2000 iterations. With the number of open connections the load testing will make, I was pretty sure the original Linksys firmware would not be able to handle it, so I was curious on how the DD-WRT firmware would perform.

The results was very promising, after running the load testing for an hour, my network was still running smoothly, and I had no connectivity issues with surfing the internet. I was also, able to download bittorrent and watch streaming video at the same time without experience any latency. I checked the status page of the router and found that the router was experiencing very high load for over a long period of time, as well it had 94% active connections of the available 4096.