Question

I had this same problem with another Linksys router using stock firmware and recently replaced it with a WRT54GL using the latest version of Tomato. The connection runs perfectly when the router is first turns on, but over the course of the day (or sometimes several days) the speed over wireless-G degrades dramatically (from 18+ Mbps when the router first starts to a few hundred Kbps later on).

This can't be related to anything other than the router because it happens on everything in the house that's wireless -- the Wii, the iPod Touch, the netbook, and Apple laptop, you name it. The connection slows to a crawl eventually, and one reboot later everything's running at top speed again.

Tomato is a stock installation. I had bumped the transmit power to 70 for a few days but dialed it back to the default 42 when this problem cropped up so I could eliminate that as a factor.

Is there something I'm missing? QOS settings or other Tomato configuration errors? Is there any long-term fix, or would I be better off investigating other options like powerline Ethernet (running cable isn't an option right now)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Try changing the TCP and UDP connection timeouts to lower values (the setting can be found here). Try halving the values that are in there already. Also, disable QoS and see if the problem persists.

One alternative may be to use an alternative Tomato distribution, like hardc0re's mod.

Answer 2

I think I found the problem. I ran a channel scan using Tomato and it reported that a previously undetected router was running on the same channel as mine. Switched it to a clear channel and have had a full day without any of the throughput degradation I'd experienced before.

Many thanks to Breakthrough for the suggestions!

Answer 3

Not an answer, but I am seeing similar weird behavior; I do not know if it is Comcast, or the Linksys router running Tomato. For me, it is not just wireless.

I installed Tomato about two weeks ago. I ran a few torrents (SXSW 2009, so about 5G total download), it worked fine, and continued to work well. I am nowhere near my DL cap (250G), and only tweaked the transmit power. But, starting yesterday, balky connection, router itself not responding on 192.168.1.1.

Something similar is described here:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22939521-Many-connections-crash-Tomato-router

When I can get the router to talk to me, there is plenty of free memory, and the load is low, and there is not even that much traffic through it. This is puzzling. I have not yet checked the behavior of a direct connection to the modem, but I that is coming soon.

Update: still not sure of the cause; I reviewed the router settings, and noticed that I was not using SYN cookies (Advanced->Firewall), and enabled that. Nothing really funny in the logs, nothing funny in the number of connections (Advanced -> Conntrack [Count current...]), even when I fired up the SXSW torrents (uploaded about a gigabyte). Tried a direct connection to the modem, and didn't see obvious glitches, but it also was not snappy -- but it's hard to tell nowadays, with ad-heavy pages, etc.