Switch can't handle traffic well?

[everman]

Only 3 pcs on the home network. If someone's playing a game, and then someone else downloads a file for any time greater than about 5 seconds at over 100kb/s the person gaming will experiance a lot of lag. Such as going from a 20 ping to 100+.
Now my cable connection here can handle around 8Mb/s, sometimes peaking higher.

So does this problem lie with the linksys, possibly not having enough processing power? If I set up my linux server here to take it's place then, I should have no performance trouble if that is the case.

 

[Boscoh]

Wouldn't surprise me if it was the linksys. But it wouldnt surprise me either if you're not getting the 8mbps you think you're getting across your cable. Keep in mind that is probably downstream traffic. Upload is usually quite a bit lower. Games a upload intensive as well. If the file transfer is TCP, then you are going to have a lot of outgoing traffic taking up the connection as well, not just incoming. The outgoing traffic could be causing the lag you're experiencing.

Try the linux box and see how that works.

 

[Goosemaster]

Linux or a hacked linksys 54g router is a great idea. AStaro linux is free and fantastic.

Both options will allow for "QoS" / "traffic shaping"

Basically, you can:

1. set protocol, port, application, or IP based priorities and throttle specific ones.
2. The ability to throttle down certain services.
3. On demand traffic shaping, where it might lfor example et someone hog the entire line with kazaa and then tone down their speeds when someone else starts sending/recieveing.