Router speeds

"Trent©"
wrote in :
I've been usin' a D-Link router on my network for years...and I
generally install either D-Link or Linksys.

Anybody done any speed comparisons...with those 2 or with any
others...that can be definitely attributable to the router?
snip

The processor is fixed within the router. You are limited to the number
of hosts that can be effectively and speedily switched by the horsepower
of your router. For example, you could define or allow 254 hosts by MAC
address to get assigned an IP address by the D-Link's DHCP server.
However, after calling D-Link regarding their DI-604 model, they suggest
not going beyond 15 concurrently active (i.e., powered on) hosts running
through the router as performance degradation gets exponentially much
poorer if additional hosts are added. The processor just cannot switch
fast enough between the virtual routes through its switch to handle all
the possible traffic from all the hosts. The switch can handle only so
many concurrent hosts. While the router might only have, say, 4 ports,
you can exceed this limit by chaining hosts through switches in a tree
so there can be more 15 that may go through the router at a time
although hopefully you position switches in the tree between the hosts
that communicate most with each other or use gateways to regulate
traffic to reduce the traffic going through the router, but all of them
will still be going through the router for Internet access.

Other models may have a different max concurrently connected hosts limit
but you never bothered to mention your models. Often the routers made
for the consumer-grade market do not specify this limit. I had to
e-mail D-Link to find this out. I haven't had more than 3 computers
concurrently connected and with all of them on, so I haven't verified
there is a hit in having to switch between too many concurrent hosts,
but I didn't see a reason why D-Link would lie to me about a limitation
in their router (but which they do not document).

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