said by radarman :

I doubt you would have better luck with the original firmware. Even the best linky's only had 32MB of RAM - and when you are using protocols like BitTorrent, where you are making connections to many different machines quickly, it doesn't take long before the connection table gets full.

It would help if EITHER firmware would do a better job of garbage collection, but alas - they both wait too long to clean up their ARP tables. The end result is that the machines bog down when you start connecting to a large number of unique hosts rapidly. The same thing will happen if you surf a lot of different sites in a short period of time as well, though it takes a lot longer - since you are presumably reading the web site, adding a delay. Note, if you can kill the ad servers with adblock, or a ad-blocking proxy, you can cut way down on the number of unique connections. Some websites will link to as many as a dozen ad servers or more.

Unfortunately, BT is a true "broadband" application, and most consumer routers have a hard time keeping up. My old (retired) Netgear router used to suffer the same problem as the Linksys routers. Eventually, they would run out of memory and slow way down (though the RT314 never did crash out on me)

This is one reason why I built a FreeBSD based router with 256MB of RAM. That machine has sat quietly in a closet routing non-stop for over 4 years now. Only power outages lasting more than 2 hours disturb its up-time - and its throughput hasn't decreased noticeably in all that time.