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I have a DLink DIR-855L router that has been working well for me for ~3years, but suddenly is acting up. The symptom is, every few hours it loses the ability to maintain transfers with websites. I can navigate to any site, and it will load the site, but any sustained data transfers like downloading files or streaming will hang after a few seconds. When I try speedtest.net, the ping is a little slow but not horrible, then the download test starts at a reasonable speed, but then stops moving at all and never completes. I have seen the same behaviour on all three of my systems (desktop, HTPC, and laptop).

The "solution" in all of the occurrences has been to reboot the router. Once I do that, everything goes back to normal (good ping numbers, speedtest.net actually completes the test with 35MB down and 5MB up which is what I'm paying for on the cable internet) and operates as you would expect... for about 5 hours. Then the problem comes back. 

After the first couple of occurrences I checked for firmware updates and installed the latest version. That didn't solve it though. 

I have double checked that no unauthorized people have logged into the router -- even when the problem is in full swing, all of the MAC addresses I see in the router connections belong to one of my devices. Shutting down or rebooting any of the connected devices has no effect on the problem, and neither does power cycling the cable modem. But power cycling the router fixes it every time. 

Any suggestions? 

Although it could be the router itself, I had a similar issue with a sonicwall router. You could browse all day but if you downloaded a (10+ meg) file it would stall on anything newer than win XP.

Go to an admin cmd prompt:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled


Edit: you may want to test turning off IPv6 in your network adapter settings, but normally I see DNS stalls when that is the issue.

I've had multiple consumer routers die this way over the years. The first couple I opened up, and discovered bad (bulging/leaking) capacitors. We really should be past the capacitor plague now, though.

Most consumer routers are junk.

Yeah, sounds like it's on it's way out.  It could also be overheating when the processor is stressed.  Make sure the vents are clear and that you have adequate ventilation.

Thanks, everyone. I'll double check that it hasn't gotten dust build up when I get home. If that's not it, guess I'm in the market for a replacement. 

Two things to try: 

Do a hard reset via the paperclip-size button, basically the router equivalent of a CMOS clear for PCs. As odd as it sounds I've seen it fix issues power cycling alone wouldn't fix on routers. A long time back when my WRT54GS began developing some weird gremlins and stability issues I did a hard reset on it and it was like I'd just taken it out of the box again, despite my previous power cycling attempts. 

Second thing is you should check on a firmware update for your specific model/hardware version router. You can try both together but I'd suggest just the reset first before you attempt to update firmware, no sense updating firmware on an unstable device as worst case it could corrupt something critical and brick it. And in the event you have already updated the firmware you MUST do a hard reset on the device anyway to avoid setting conflicts.

I had a DSL modem/router combo die this way.  In the span of maybe a month is started dropping connections or just locking up every few days, then every day or two, then rapidly devolved to daily, hourly, and stick a fork in it.  At first a power-cycle would get it back, towards the very end it had to be hard reset a couple times.  Then it finally barfed up an entire row of error lights and wouldn't respond to anything, so that was that.

But even so, the firmware update and the hard reset are easy enough to do before deciding that it's truly done.

This is how my Buffalo router's wifi chips died. First, normal (for ~2 years). Symptom #1 was sustained transfers dying over Wifi, quickly followed by total inability to stream even 1 Mbps video without Wifi dropping out. By the end it wouldn't even stay connected well enough to get to Google. Interestingly, when the Wifi had finally degraded to unusability, wired connections followed the same fate after another week or so.

Waco wrote:

This is how my Buffalo router's wifi chips died. First, normal (for ~2 years). Symptom #1 was sustained transfers dying over Wifi, quickly followed by total inability to stream even 1 Mbps video without Wifi dropping out. By the end it wouldn't even stay connected well enough to get to Google. Interestingly, when the Wifi had finally degraded to unusability, wired connections followed the same fate after another week or so.

Sounds like the power regulation circuitry started to go, possibly a bad caps issue. Noise on the rails or out-of-tolerance voltages will tend to affect sensitive analog RF circuitry the most, so the WiFi would logically be the first thing to go. Modern wired Ethernet is basically analog RF black magic too, just not quite as much voodoo involved as with WiFi... so as things continued to degrade it took out the wired side. I imagine that eventually things would've gotten bad enough to crash the internal processor.

just brew it! wrote:

Most consumer routers are junk.

QFT.  Back when I still had a couple of Linksys wireless routers, it seemed like after transmitting X amount of GB, they would just stop working (both the WAP and wired ports).  Rebooting it was the only way to "fix" it.   But OPs router does seem like it's more of an overheating/failing components issue, instead of the behavior I saw.
Depending on OPs price point and needs (like running WRT or something), a company I used to work for would deploy these AP/BRs that were essentially a MikroTik routerboard in a sealed enclosure for outdoor deployment (we'd replace the crap WLAN cards for ones from Ubiquiti).  Those lasted a long time (they were still working fine when I left the company several years later) and I never once had to reboot or replace one. 
Just my 2 cents.

I took a look at the router last night. There aren't any exposed screws to take it apart, so I suspect it's one of those "snap it closed never open it again" type of designs. There doesn't appear to be any dust build up around the air intakes -- that doesn't mean it doesn't have the mother of all spider's nests hiding inside, of course.

I'll try the hardware reset suggestion to see if that helps. Failing that, though, it may be time to move up to an AC1900 or AC3200 router. 

just brew it! wrote:

Sounds like the power regulation circuitry started to go, possibly a bad caps issue. Noise on the rails or out-of-tolerance voltages will tend to affect sensitive analog RF circuitry the most, so the WiFi would logically be the first thing to go. Modern wired Ethernet is basically analog RF black magic too, just not quite as much voodoo involved as with WiFi... so as things continued to degrade it took out the wired side. I imagine that eventually things would've gotten bad enough to crash the internal processor.

Possibly. I opened it up and didn't see anything out of the ordinary (no bulged caps at least).

I was quite happy to justify getting a nice AC1900 replacement.

Failing capacitors don't always show outward signs of damage; that was specifically a "capacitor plague" era thing. For liquid electrolyte caps that aren't defective by design, more typically the electrolyte just dries out, causing the capacitance to drop.

Yup - I was justifying the shiny new router though.

I had one of those routers. I had that problem from day one. WRT did help but it was still junk. Be rid of it.

If you have knowledge, budget, and desire, I suggest going the route I did. I love my Ubiquiti and PFSense setup.