If you are having speed issues in your browser then you’re either:

Overloading your connection RATE, limit your downloads to allow at least 32KB/s through, or more like 128KB/s if you have a multi Mb/s down.

Or – you’re overloading the connection limit on your router. If rebooting the router “helps” restore the connection than that’s the problem is your router is chocking on the connections. Some Linksys routers leave connections open for half an hour, lol. So changing the half-open connections OR NOT can choke those routers either way. The thing you need to be careful of on those is the TOTAL amount of connections allowed. And limiting that can hit your download speeds more than half-open limits, but that’s what you get for running crappy software on your router. Upgrade to DD-WRT.

I also have to agree that the Linksys WRT54G Is prone to choking up. I may look into the newer version or a different one entirely.

Good luck to all of you.

However, ‘max half-open connections’ affects the _rate_ at which the connections get estabilished, and is therefore of much less utility as a tweakable property. Its side effect of choking the network is limited to the TCP/IP stack of just the pc running ut, not the entire home network, so in my case it was not the router’s fault.

Thanks for the useful pointers!

1) Don’t set the half open connections to 250 – that is WAY to much for a 1 Mbit connection.
The patch suggests 50 connections and that should work well for most people. There are diminishing returns to increase the limit of connections anyways so don’t feel bad about setting a lower limit.

2) Too much traffic and too many packets choke programs using the internet connection, but you can resolve this problem by using QoS traffic shaping either in your hardware router, your software router, or on your own pc.
It prioritizes internet traffic according to importance, so your torrent traffic will not choke internet browsing and will make your internet connection feel much more responsive. It should also boost your speed because the connection will be utilized better.
Whatever you set your max connection limit to , make sure to reserve a few connections for other traffic like browsers and mailprogram and such. 10 connections reserved should be plenty, as it is after all the max limit on a unpatched Windows pc.
So if you patch your limit to 50 , set your torrent program to use max 40.

For a hardware router you can use a custom firmware with QoS , like f.x Tomato :
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/
If you need a router then I suggest Buffalo routers – They are quite good in my experience.

For a software router (usually a linux pc) there are several way to do this and packages that help you do this .. I did a quick search and found http://www.mastershaper.org/ which looks interesting.

For a Windows client you can use Cfosspeed : http://www.cfos.de/speed/cfosspeed_e.htm
Cfos also have a page that explains traffic shaping :
http://www.cfos.de/traffic_shaping/traffic_shaping_e.htm
A good read if you are new to the subject.