Judging by my experience, router software probably has memory leaks so it eventually runs out of available memory and stops working properly.
This is more so if you’re using it for something that opens and closes a ton of connections, such as torrenting. In fact maybe 1 or 2 decades ago when those things had less memory the low and mid end quality routers couldn’t handle torrenting directly (so, when the router had to route each new connection, not behind a VPN were its the VPN-server that does it) without dying in a few hours.
Most slow or even no-connection problems I have get solved by restarting the router, though I have my own router and it’s a high-end consumer one (rather that using the one provided by the ISP), so nowadas that kind of problem happens maybe twice a year at most.
That wouldn’t explain why some fail in hours when there are tons of connections being opened and closed (like with torrenting) whilst others with only twice or four times the memory will last for months, which is far more that two or four times as long.
I think it’s mainly memory leaks exactly because in my experience the failure rate seems proportional to Free Memory and frequency of memory allocation (hence hitting much more cheaper low memory routers where a much larger proportion of memory is allocated just for static code and data, in usage situations were a ton of small memory allocations are being allocated, than routers with a bit more memory or in normal usage situations) rather than proportional to Total memory in-use even when statically allocated.
Not to say that the problem you describe doesn’t happen, just that it doesn’t really explain the distribution in frequency of failures depending on router memory and router usage pattern.
Judging by my experience, router software probably has memory leaks so it eventually runs out of available memory and stops working properly.
This is more so if you’re using it for something that opens and closes a ton of connections, such as torrenting. In fact maybe 1 or 2 decades ago when those things had less memory the low and mid end quality routers couldn’t handle torrenting directly (so, when the router had to route each new connection, not behind a VPN were its the VPN-server that does it) without dying in a few hours.
Most slow or even no-connection problems I have get solved by restarting the router, though I have my own router and it’s a high-end consumer one (rather that using the one provided by the ISP), so nowadas that kind of problem happens maybe twice a year at most.
Consumer routers use neither ECC nor registered or buffered memory, so i guess it’s just the odd bit flip after weeks of running, in most cases.
That wouldn’t explain why some fail in hours when there are tons of connections being opened and closed (like with torrenting) whilst others with only twice or four times the memory will last for months, which is far more that two or four times as long.
I think it’s mainly memory leaks exactly because in my experience the failure rate seems proportional to Free Memory and frequency of memory allocation (hence hitting much more cheaper low memory routers where a much larger proportion of memory is allocated just for static code and data, in usage situations were a ton of small memory allocations are being allocated, than routers with a bit more memory or in normal usage situations) rather than proportional to Total memory in-use even when statically allocated.
Not to say that the problem you describe doesn’t happen, just that it doesn’t really explain the distribution in frequency of failures depending on router memory and router usage pattern.
Ah sure, those are buggy.