Router requests capacity

Question

Does anybody have any idea how many requests per second a regular home router can handle?

Let's say we are talking about TCP HTTP requests. How many requests can it handle before significant delays will occur?

I think about 50 - 60 tcp requests per second could be served.

Most home routers do not provide this information, sow how can I know? And where can I find routers for a reasonable price which can support many requests (800- 1000 per second)?

Answer 1

My home router handles between 800 and 1000 simultaneous TCP connections.

My DDWRT with 32 MB of RAM is perfectly capable of maxing out the 4096 connections (which is the maximum value you can set from the GUI)

Answer 2

Requests per seconds is typically not an interesting factor for a home router, and 60 RPS is a very very low number for any network equipment.

Instead it sounds like you ask about the state memory: How many possible states the router can keep in memory. A state has to be kept for each TCP and UDP connection. Cheap routers typically manage 1000 states or so.

The problem that you run into is when you are trying to create a lot of states in the router before the previous connections can be cleaned up. The router then basicly have three options:

• Time out old states (killing the associated old TCP connection)
• Do not create a new state (Blocking connection establishment)
• Crash and burn (If it's a D-link)

If you want to keep lots of states I would strongly suggest a Linux or OpenBSD based firewall/NAT and a switch instead of a home router. Home routers tend to have very limited memory to keep them cheap.