turned off dchp and nework perked up

I have a linksys route with a 15 user lan one side and the net the outher
side.
The router was set to dchp 192.168.1.1/100 to the lan.
One of the lan is a win 2k 14 are win98se.
We were getting clients drop out and locks on the lan.
Swithed off the dchp in the linksys put fixed 192.168.1.1/100 in the clients
and its 100% improved.
Any othe experience in this area would be appreciated
regards Alan G

 

You might want to check the Linksys web site to see if they have a firmware update for the router. Also check the lease on your DHCP clients to make sure the expiration isn't set too low.

 

That's certainly a mystery to me, since I've setup every LAN I do with DHCP! I've never seen that effect, and I'm having some difficulty imagining how DHCP could adversely affect the performance like that.

DHCP only comes into play during the initial assignment of the IP address, and when it's time to renew the lease. If the DHCP server isn't on Jupiter with some really long link delays, the process takes microseconds to renew a lease.

The only way I can see you having overhead is if you set your lease time to a second or less, and I'll bet there isn't even an option to do that on your router.

I've used TCP/IP in embedded systems where I had to program the management of the DHCP traffic myself, and my timings indicate that the overhead to assign IP addresses is too small to be measured in any typical network.

It's significant to note that in any large network, the use of DHCP is almost mandatory to avoid extensive manual configuration for changes. If there were such a deficiency in DHCP, I can't imagine it wouldn't have been addressed long ago, but as I said, I don't believe there is a problem with it.