Asus RT-N12/D1 w/Tomato - curious issue, high CPU load?

[VirtualLarry]

I don't get it. I woke up my PC, and I couldn't connect to some sites. I logged into my router, and it was taking forever, and timed out several times. When I finally got in, it had a CPU load ave of like 5.0/5.0/5.0. I checked the number of connections, it was like 1800 out of 4096, RAM usage was like 50%, but for some reason, CPU load was really high.

I don't quite understand why. I do have Transmission running on my NAS, but I've maxed out my upload setting (3MB/sec) often, and it still doesn't choke my connections or downloads. (Note that's just my setting limit for the upload, my actual pipe is like 9MB/sec - FIOS.)

I am concerned that perhaps some chinese or middle-eastern IP found me via the torrents, and was attempting to hack my router or DoS it. I don't have the PPTP server enabled, nor AFAIK do I have any SSH or other services running.

 

[Elixer]

Hmm, do the logs show anything?
I would enable SSH, and then log into the router, and use top or whatever to find out what is eating the CPU.
Could be I/O as well.

 

[bononos]

Openwrt supports that model so you could try that as a quick check to see if it could be hardware related.