Quote Originally Posted by Raist View Post
May daughter facetimes on her ipod touch
Facetime, Skype and various other remote access software (including google drive, dropbox, etc) actually keep their processes running and connected to a server outside your network, that's how you're able to access your cloud files, or files physically on your machine without having to leave ports open on your system. In general you shouldn't -have- to open ports if everything worked properly. Traditionally you had to open ports because the software firewall or router was changed from default "allow everything out" to "allow only what I say out" since that's also how botnets communicate. The reverse, allowing traffic in is usually a "block unless initiated from the inside", like games.

As I mentioned in another thread, the "crashing the network" thing I've been able to do with the WRT54G when it was put behind my then-ISP 's Television over IP service, the multicast traffic overwhelmed it after several minutes and then rebooted itself. I suspect something similar to be the case for those who experience this.

That said, I've been peering over at the netstat list every time I see the game stutter and the highest I've seen FFXIV at is 12% CPU, 8KB/sec recieve and 2KB/sec transmit. Without analyzing the packets themselves I can't really dig in further, though it may have something to do with congestion control. Or as pointed out the TOE/LSO may be bad on the network card or router. If you have matched gear (eg realtek+realtek, Atheros+Atheros, Broadcom+Broadcom, it may enable vendor-specific features that don't work properly) I know atheros gear does this.