My apartment is wireless. Really wireless. No cable, no phone. But I live in the future, where the internet is involved in anything you do. So my neighbor has a wifi router that we’ve put DD-WRT on. It’s really much better than the original firmware that comes with your router, for a number of reasons. We’d been noticing a slowdown though. The router would, over the course of a few days, get slower and slower. The key symptom was that DNS lookups would be really spotty.

Turns out that bittorrent clients open up a lot of ports, especially if they are using dynamic hash tracking (DHT). The limited number of ports the router was allocating were being filled up by DHT and not released.

Router slowdown solution, from the dd-wrt wiki: increase the max number of ports and then decrease the timeout delay for those ports. I put this solution in on Tuesday night, and it’s been fine since then.