I got an eee pad transformer today for my birthday. At first I was excited, because I knew I wanted something with a touch screen, light weight, and able to do the following:

Play osu!
Read network stored comics/pdf/online web stories.
Browse the internet
Watch network stored soft-subtitled h.264 video.

Well after fiddling around with it for about 2 hours, I've come to the conclusion that it can't run windows applications due to the Android OS, so osu! is out.
Reading non-ebook stuff is a bit clunky, as I can't easily access my shared folder on my desktop. Soon I will have a machine which can act as a server, though I've never done that before, so I'm unsure of how to use it.
It does the internet just fine.
I'm a bit skeptical about watching video, but I haven't done much. The default video player is slow, and doesn't render subtitles. I can't just click on the file on my network share to play it--I first have to copy it over.

Finally, it seems that this thing is uploading something or other at an alarming rate. I've tried multiple times, turning on and off the pad, and turning on and off utorrent. Whenever utorrent and the eee pad are on, my router stops responding because the modem is overloaded (or at least that's what I figure. Lanthanide, can you explain to me why my router stops responding whenever I reach my maximum upload speed according to my ISP?). And yes, my modem and router are separate things. utorrent is capped at 20 kB/s, and my maximum speed is around 45 kB/s, which means that the eee pad has to be uploading something at 20-25 kB/s for this to be happening. If I turn everything off, I get the normal 1-8 ms ping time to my router. If I have both on, the ping is 1800 ms or times out. I've even had windows report a network error.

I really want this thing to work exactly the way I want it, because my family payed a lot for this ($500).

Well, at least it's got Tegra. =/

speaking of tegra, are there any benchmarks which compare big phones that can't make phone calls to real tablets?

As in... Tegra vs corei5 or something? And no, of course you can't run Windows applications...

There might be a VLC for Android; I remember reading something about that. If not, take a look for something else, people really like rooting Android and installing their own stuff on it.

I would expect there to be applications to access shared folders or whatever else you need. Synology, what I'm using, has an application for Android and iOS, for example; and if yours is just using Windows, I'd expect there to be several options to choose from.

As in something like atom vs tegra. Obviously you can't run Windows on an ARM processor, but there are emulators for everything. Whyshould anyone gimp their computer by not allowing Windows progams to run is beyond me. There is this glorified remote control program which runs media extremely poorly, when it could just instead do a remote desktop.

I got the media streaming to work, but it uses a stupid WMP interface to work, and the screen doesn't tilt when you rotate it, so it's worthless to me.

Ghost Commander is supposed to be able to access samba shares, but it can't stream the file. You have to wait until the file is completely transferred to open it.

Shitty router. Pinging to the local side of your router shouldn't be affected by traffic going to your modem/ISP, certainly not at a load rate of 45k/s which is really quite low.

It could also potentially be a mis-configuration on the router. Our L3 switches at work normally do everything in hardware, but if something goes wrong (ARP entry missing for whatever reason), we end up with CPU routing, which degrades performance of everything on the box, often to a stand-still and can even result in crashes and lockups. If your EEE pad is actually sending like 10+ Mbit/second to your router, which is having to drop most of the traffic because of the limited bandwidth to the internet, that could explain the load. Another possibility is that the two streams of traffic are causing the router to continually update something in it's hardware tables, like it gets a packet from the PC so it updates the table, then the next packet is from the EEE so it updates the table, then the next packet is from the PC so it updates the table etc, I don't think this should normally happen, though.

Without being familiar with your router (even if you told me it's model that wouldn't help me) I can't really offer any conclusive cause, only some guesses for what could be going wrong. Probably your router has no way of indicating its CPU load, or if there was a way for it to do this (web-based management, usually), when it was undergoing the high CPU load it wouldn't respond to the management requests anyway.

I talked with a friend at my local computer shop, he seems to think "shitty router" too. He went on to say "any router you name I'm going to say it's a bad router too", since virtually every router suffers from the same cheap consumer problem.
I am on a 7 Mbit down / 368 kbit up.

I think it's mere coincidence that 45 kB/s is my maximum upload and the same speed at which my router craps out. I've used 2 routers both of which had the same problem, so I assumed it wasn't the router's fault. It's more likely that all consumer grade routers suck. I think I'll try my hand at making an actual server computer, hooking up an ICS, and connecting the router to the computer that way so that the router doesn't have to handle so much (and I'll just p2p on the server). Unless of course you can recommend a router which does not slow down from heavy p2p upload (download is fine, I get 1 MB/s at times) and perhaps has good software controlling it so I can enable QoS and such.

It's a strange problem that I've had with seemingly every router I've ever tried...

What specifically is the problem? That you can't have 2 computers sharing the network at a time? If "every" router you ever use has that problem, and you've been using the same modem/ISP/physical phone line, I'd say it's more a problem with your modem/ISP/phone line than it is the routers. If that's the case, then setting up a server to run as your router may not solve anything - although it should be much easier to diagnose what might be going wrong as you can install all different types of software on servers that you simply can't do with routers.

As for routers to recommend, don't have any sorry, I'm not really in the consumer sphere. I've got a Cisco WAG310G at home which is about the top end of the market. It's the 2nd one we've had actually, and looks like it is faulty, just as the first one was. Thinking about returning it to the store in the next few days. But this cost something like $300, while most consumer routers here are $100-200 (just went looking in the shops today). It's expensive because it has dedicated VOIP ports for phones, as I've got a bundled deal with my ISP. Probably what I've got you would call "pro-sumer".

I have about a $180 router (actually a compact computer with a 500 MHz x86 CPU, in a box about the size of a typical router) and it works great for handling lots of connections. On something like that, you can use one of the available Linux or BSD distros that are for routers, having a web-based configuration tool (if that is what you would prefer); probably just about any of them handling traffic better than what is preloaded on the cheap routers you can buy. I'm currently using pfSense on it, which is FreeBSD-based (pfSense is only supported on x86 CPUs right now).

If you want a router that you can load some open source distro on it but don't want to spend that much, you could get an N wireless router that OpenWrt or DD-WRT supports (DD-WRT is based on OpenWrt but isn't updated as often, AFAIK). Even if you don't use wireless you should get one with N wireless if you want a good CPU in it, since the ones with wireless will more likely have a faster CPU than ones without, and faster CPU for ones with N than ones with slower speeds. I have a wireless access point with support for N (I use it just for adding wireless to my network, of course); it has a 400 MHz CPU and with OpenWrt it can handle at least 100 Mbps of data going through it (it is actually faster than my router, but it doesn't have as much RAM or storage space). The router version of it has the same basic hardware, but has extra ethernet ports.

If you want to get something for loading OpenWrt or DD-WRT on it, it would probably be in the range of $40 - $60, unless you want support for wireless on the 5.2 or 5.8 GHz frequency bands and not just 2.4 GHz only, like the cheaper stuff has. If you want 5.2/5.8 GHz wireless support, that approximately doubles the minimum and maximum prices in the range. Part of that increase is likely because many of the "dual band" routers have a faster CPU in them. They also often have a second wireless device in them. If you are interested in getting something to load one of these OS distributions onto, I could give some recommendations.

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Jun 18 2011, 12:42 pm by ShadowFlare.

Well, after my friend suggested I not let the router handle the DNS, I switched over to 8.8.8.8, which is the Google DNS. Now I can't get the full 45 kBps, because of something called overhead, but it's working fine now.

I already wrote this once by the SQL error ate it.

"not let the router handle the DNS"
I'm not sure what that is actually supposed to mean. Have you set DNS on your computer instead of using the server set by your router? You could just set your router to use Google DNS as well. All that setting DNS on your router does, if you're using DHCP, is send that configuration to your computer/desktop which uses it locally - the router doesn't actually do anything itself other than act as a convenient place to set the configuration. Eg if you had a network of 200 computers, instead of changing the setting on all 200 computers individually, just change it once on the router and it'll send out the configuration the computers itself.

"Now I can't get the full 45 kBps, because of something called overhead"
That would always have been the case, regardless of the DNS server you're using. You may be aware of that, but your phrasing could easily confuse other people. The overhead he's most likely talking about is simply the protocol overhead involved in IP and TCP and any other higher-layer protocols like FTP or HTTP. Maximum packet size on the internet is 1500 bytes, but 20 of that is used for the IP header, and 20+ used for TCP, leaving at most 1460 bytes for user data. But you'll still be transmitting at 45kBps - it just won't be 45kBps of 'user data'. But since there's no way around the protocol overhead, and usually it is a very small amount relative to user data, it's pretty academic talking about it.

I set the computer's DNS to use google's.

I didn't type much because typing on the tablet sucks balls.

The overhead I'm talking about is this:

which is pretty significant, probably because I have so many concurrent uploads. Reducing that number gets me up from 35 to ~40.

Yeah, 'payload' is just 'user data', so the overhead is simple protocol overhead. The fewer packets you send, the greater your user data vs overhead is going to be. So the fewer total connections you have, the more user data you can get through.

This is why having 1,000 connections when downloading a file would be considerably slower than just have 10 connections, even if those 1,000 connections were all as nominally fast as the 10 (assuming that your link speed doesn't also increase - it becomes the bottleneck clogged with protocol overhead).

ah well, I'm glad I solved my "problem" for at least the time being.

Why on earth they charge $50 for such crappy routers I'll never know.

You bought it.

I've had good luck mounting samba shares with cifsmanager and I've had good luck playing files off that share with RockPlayer. Not sure if your device needs to be rooted to mount with cifsmanager, I forget.

Also - if you're in the market for a new router - I suggest something supporting DD-WRT or OpenWRT(I've never actually used Open, only DD-WRT, but I hear good things about it), specifically http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162031 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124407 (recertified)

That Buffalo wireless router has decent specs - 400 MHz CPU, 64 MB RAM, and 32 MB flash (RAM and flash size is better than most). There is also a dual band version for a little more money, if you need 5 GHz support: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833162047 It has a 680 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, and 32 MB flash. Preloaded with some DD-WRT image, but no DD-WRT images are currently available for it from dd-wrt.com. OpenWrt also has it in the list of supported hardware.