OpenWRT – Followup – Improved Latency / Ping

As I work for a hosting company that monitors a LOT of network traffic data it’s only natural that my own DSL line is being “watched” (it makes talking to our ISP a lot more interesting!)
If you look at the screenshot below you will see a very big difference in the connection from around lunchtime today:
Michele DSL Line Smokeping
So what changed?
The only thing that changed was the firmware on the Linksys WRT54G.
Nothing else has changed in my setup.
I’m not complaining, but the difference is startling.
If only I had known 🙂

By Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and CEO of Irish hosting provider and domain name registrar Blacknight.

7 comments

  1. That’s rather nice! I may upgrade once my phone line is fixed (fingers crossed). A weird thing happens sometimes with my wireless router and dsl router – the linksys simply dies for no reason.
    I’ve been trying to debug it, and had pings running in a terminal and the latency was shocking! Hopefully a new firmware will fix that. Now if only Eircom would get their finger out.. They have a 5 day SLA with UTV Talk so here’s hoping that it’ll get fixed by Monday afternoon.

  2. so what was the old firmware, and the new one?
    also, what scripts are you using to generate the graph? I love the gray shading! great visualization!

  3. Donncha – upgrading seems to have worked for me 🙂
    Justin – Old one was Sveasoft. I’d also tried a couple of other derivatives
    The graphs are produced using SmokePing with RRDTool – the grey maybe a great visual, but it makes browsing the net really painful 🙂

  4. I’ve had nothing but trouble with the Sveasoft firmware.
    Strange bugs, unsolved problems and just general weirdness…
    Another alternative is DD-Wrt, but if you’re happy with OpenWRT, stick with it.

  5. I’ve found the wireless support on OpenWRT to totally suck. So I have another WRT54G running DD-WRT and I couldn’t be happier with it.

  6. Conor
    What sucked about it?
    I haven’t had any complaints from my wireless users since I changed over, so I’d love to know what could go wrong 🙂
    M

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