Router Question.

Hey all--

I have a Linksys WRT56GS v4 router. I was wondering if anyone around here has used a third party OS on their router and enabled such things as QoS...would this have any impact on how the lag I experience?

System spec:
Abit NF7
AMD 2700+
1024mb Ram
40gb hard drive
ATi X850 vid card

Internet is only 256/128 u/d. Slow, I know...but since I'm the only one in town with broadband, and the ISP isn't installing anyone else until they get more bandwidth to their shop, I've got to work with what I've got.

I was thinking about installing the www.dd-wrt.com software onto the Linksys, but I wanted to know if anyone here has done that, and if so, how has it impacted net performance.

Thanks for any info!

-WT

I have never known home routers to be a factor in any MMO (except for buggy ones that hang or slow down under heavy traffic).

Think of it this way, you are coming off your machine at 5, 10, or 100 Mbps, cramming it into your much narrower DSL, sending it across who knows how many hops, and through LL's front door. Your router is one of the faster devices in the chain.

I did read somewhere (here?) about a tweak that someone did to ensure that the router gave preferential treatment to outgoing ACKs to minimize unneeded re-transmits from LL. That seems promising.

I am one of the home users that is 100m up down here. And the client can`t keep up.

That sounds like a QoS service...something Linksys doesn't put as an option in their firmware.

When you install a 'network' to use a router as a way of communicating to other pc's and or router, QoS is part of the core drivers loaded. Check out the Properties of your connection, you should see these drivers already installed and running.

QoS, or Quality of Service, must be supported on all the network hardware. Your computer may adjusting packet priority, but once it hits your switch/hub/router/etc. all those packets will be handled the same regardless. To get QoS truly working with your network, your router must be able to actually perform QoS.

I'm running on a WRT54GL with the sveasoft firmware. I think with the latest GS, you may be out of luck; those later-version models beyond version 4.0 use a new proprietary VxWorks operating system with poorer hardware specs.

I haven't actually tried enabling QoS and setting it up for Second Life yet. I don't particularly feel the need, because I'm just one person, so there's no one I'm competing with. With QoS, as someone mentioned above, all you could do would be to give preference to the OUTGOING traffic from your computer to LL's servers. If you have a lot of people in your house using the same connection that are soaking up your upstream bandwidth (with such things as bittorrent), then you could definitely stand to benefit from enabling QoS. Otherwise, it won't do much for you.

Thank you, all, for your help and input.

I guess that I'm just a tinkerer by nature

Have a great day!

Nothing wrong with that. SL wouldn't exist if it weren't for tinkerers.

In fact, I'm *VERY* curious about how THIS would work with SL. It has shown noticeable improvements in WOW by offloading the duties the CPU was performing for the onboard NIC. I bet it'd be a huge improvement in SL considering its CPU and network loads. But at $250 ($150 for the 'budget' model), it's way too expensive to just buy one and try.

I doubt you have 100Mb/sec up and down in a residential service. You probably have a 100Mb/sec LAN connection to your router, but your router has a lower rate to the service provider. Even "business class residential" service isn't nearly that fast.

The bottleneck is the thin straw between your router and the service provider, not the router. I doubt that QoS would improve performance significantly, unless there is a way to classify specific kinds of SL traffic that need to be lower latency than other traffic. For example if SL protocols use different IP priority values, then it's possible that using router software that honors it could help.

If anyone knows enough about the SL protocols to answer this, I'd be very interested to learn more.

Cheers
Jeff

well I am in Japan................... does that mean anything. And I do hun....lines are differ out here then in the usa.
Why even say anything? Do you use my connect or even know what it is ? NO! Why are you ASUMMING? Makes no sence? I had this 100m line for over a year And Yes its a Fiber Optical connection..............next time please don`t assume

Thank you