Zyxel Keenetic vs. Lite for gaming & P2P with many connections

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Seedmanc

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Jun 20, 2013
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I'm planning to buy a router to serve internet for both my main PC via cable and to notebook via Wi-Fi. My ISP works via L2TP and my current speed is 20 Mbit.
What confuses me is that I heard about L2TP being resource-intensive, especially when dealing with many connections at once, and I think it could be my case. I have around 200 torrents in my client seeding right now, however at any given time only around 5 of them are uploading data and even that takes less than 20% of my maximum speed. So bandwidth-wise there's low load, but connection-wise there might be many of them (actually I don't know how many simultaneous connections I have or how many is it compared to average user).
Will Zyxel Keenetic Lite be able to handle this with low enough ping for playing online games, or should I buy "full" Keenetic instead, or even another model completely (preferably under 80 USD)?
 
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This is tough to say and those routers are not a common brand sold in the EU or the USA so not a lot of people on this forum may have seen them.

L2TP main reason it is resource intensive is it a tunneling protocol. If combined with ipsec then you have the encryption overhead. Most the problem occur because the router must fragment and possibly reassemble packets that are too long to send when you include the extra headers needed to tunnel the traffic. This is not so much a number of session issue or a bit torrent unique problem. Anything that is sending lots of maximum MTU packet will cause the router to have to spend lots of time messing around with the packets so they fit.

The number of session is more a NAT issue and is more...
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Seedmanc

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Jun 20, 2013
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I did a bit more of a research and found that people also suggest using Upvel UR-325BN, which is said to have hardware-accelerated L2TP mode, and also is 3x cheaper than Keenetics. However it is tricky to setup and change firmware. I wonder if I should use it or Keenetic II instead.
By the way, am I being ignored because I mentioned torrents? I'm pretty sure I've seen similar question with them here that had enough of discussion. It was dated 2007 though.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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This is tough to say and those routers are not a common brand sold in the EU or the USA so not a lot of people on this forum may have seen them.

L2TP main reason it is resource intensive is it a tunneling protocol. If combined with ipsec then you have the encryption overhead. Most the problem occur because the router must fragment and possibly reassemble packets that are too long to send when you include the extra headers needed to tunnel the traffic. This is not so much a number of session issue or a bit torrent unique problem. Anything that is sending lots of maximum MTU packet will cause the router to have to spend lots of time messing around with the packets so they fit.

The number of session is more a NAT issue and is more memory related than CPU. Of course if the table gets huge the router may spend more time search the memory for entries. Still this NAT issue is not related to l2TP connection. The translation of the addresses occurs well before it attempt to send them to the ISP.

Hard to say about which router. I know if you are running IPSEC over l2tp (which is very common) devices that have hardware accelerators do help. In most cases where I have seen this are in firewalls designed to be used with VPN. Other than that I would suspect the router that has a cpu with the highest clock rate would be able to pass more tunnel traffic.
 
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