Bittorrenting on the DIR-300

Most people will mentally link “stability with bittorrent” to the D-Link brand name due to their successful GamerLounge or Gaming series of router, namely – DGL-4100 and DGL-4300. Next came the successful extreme series, the DIR-635 and DIR-655.

So I am pretty interested to find out how would this DIR-300 router perform. For this, I set up a pretty legal system for downloading torrents.

1. Bittorrent client – utorrent
2. Popular torrents – Fedora Core, Ubuntu, OpenOffice
3. Client – IBM T43 over wireless (Intel 2200BG)

The utorrent client is set up with the following configurations:

• Max global connection: 384
• Connection per torrent: 128
• Number of torrents: 3

The settings for the utorrent might sound normal to you. Yeah, I want to see if the DIR-300 can handle my normal bittorrent load.

There is no point setting the above mention values if it doesn’t stress the router at all during the test. Therefore I made several conditions to be met during the test. Namely they were:

1. Webpage set to auto refresh (30 sec interval) to emulate user surfing
2. continuous ping to check if there are any increase in latency

The DIR-300 fair well and didn’t give up during the day test. It is rather good for moderate bittorrent test. I had expected it to give me some problems. Ping values hovered between 96ms and 106ms. I guess I was too lenient with it. So it’s time to perform a harsher test.

A harsher test – Kill it!

The test was then repeated with the following utorrent configurations

• Max global connection: 896
• Connection per torrent: 224
• Number of torrents: 4

The conditions for this test is still the same except for the following addition:

1. Current connections count should be between 620 and 896

The setup went fine for the first hour without any feeling of lagginess (probably because my bandwidth has not been saturated) and the ping values were pretty stable (96~104ms) for www.google.com.

I checked the status at the second hour mark and realized that the downloading has stopped while the router is still blinking happily at the corner of my room. It seems like the router has hung. Double confirmed by looking at the ping log entries. The connection is dead. I couldn’t get a ping reply from the router as well. The last successful ping recorded was still within the range of 96~104ms. I guess that the router gave up out of a sudden.

Conclusion

IIt is pretty value-for-money (at S$79) considering the ease of setting up the device and capable of doing moderate bittorrent downloading. Don’t expect it to be very good as it is not part of the D-Link extreme series. It satisfy my needs of using it for my temporary internet connection.