Factorio Forums

From time to time, I'm having an issue where when I download maps, my router loses internet access as if the download saturates the router 1000%.

When the map download fails, the router is able to resume working.

I used both a wifi laptop and a desktop and both have the same issue.

My router is a TPLINK TL-WR841N with up to date firmwware.

Logs are attached.

Thanks

There is nothing an application can do that would make your modem lose internet connection unless the connection itself is the issue. When you lose connection by utilizing it you should contact your ISP.

The router itself is losing connection, not my ISP. I don't know much about TPLink other than it's a very popular brand for some unknown reason. Factorio is the only application that I have seen do this and only when downloading a map.

Maybe my router has trouble with the packets for some reason. I need to understand how Factorio is downloading the maps (TCP/UDP/Torrent/etc). Perhaps there is something I can disable in the router that is causing the issue even though I setup the desktop to run in the DMZ. I suspect there is some sort of limit in the router that I need to look into but I need to know how the maps are being downloaded.

And my internet speed is a mere 5 / .5 Wifi internet because we live in the mountains.

Factorio uses solely UDP, see here: https://wiki.factorio.com/Multiplayer

Moved to technical help.

I'm not sure if it's fair to blame your router, but cheap/bad routers can do this.
For instance, I got cable internet the other week. I first set it up with the cable modem/router only, and was playing minecraft. It worked great until I tried downloading something in the background... then Minecraft completely lost connection to the internet. The download was great, it hit 70 megabits or so which impressed me... but the entire time it was happening, I could not do anything else with the internet.

So I bridged my old router with the modem and let it do the networking, and now everything works great.
Maybe you could configure something better to fix it, but if you have another router around I'd suggest you try that first.

I wish I had another router. I would like to try PfSense but it would be in VM and I have no way of knowing how to set up the physical PC to use the virtual nic.

I had this problem with a friend of mine with with the same issues of him disconnecting his connection when when we loaded a multiplayer game with either him hosting of me hosting.

We both had infinity connections so have 10's Mbps up and down.

We finally got it to work by restricting the upload speed of the map (we did 110KB).

Hope that helps if you are having the same issue.

While TPLink is indead popular, i would not call it reliable, at least when we talking SOHO routers, either it's wireless or wired.
TPLink SOHO routers have cheap construction with rather poor cooling solution (having passive cooling is not bad, in fact it's great, no noise, but is not good, when it's realized by small piece of metal, and without proper thermal paste). Usual problem with TPLink routers is, that they tend to overheat when handling high packet rates, which leads to different issues ranging from packet loss, speed downgrades or connection interuption to total communication loss, when you need to restart your router.

as pointed by @Wisey limiting datarate for map download might help, since it will limit number of packets processed by router.

Mind, this is nothing against TPLink, you can find similar issue with lot of cheap SOHO router, just because they lot popular, i see them more often than others, and also reports about their issues. Tho' i never had such problem with SMC or Netgear, i've seen similar issues on some models of Zyxel, Huawei or Asus routers (which are popular here for a change), so i would not believe there is any "best" manufacturer, when it comes to cheap routers.

Mind also some routers have rather bad implementation of SPI firewall (if they have such functionality), which can easily overload router CPU. I would recommend checking, if there is no firmware update for your router, which also might solve your problem.