Perhaps it's preventing power-saving?

That would be my guess. SSH sessions into the phone for example are much more responsive/stable when power-saving is disabled. Of course, battery life suffers greatly.

Perhaps. If so, go into your network connection's settings, into the advanced settings, and disable power saving. Then test again.

Assuming you're talking about WiFi. If the 3G/2G antennas use power saving, I can't really say. With WiFi, I think you're better off just disabling power saving, as that will spend less power then keeping the wifi card working all the time in spite of power saving, AND pinging non-stop at the same time.

I've also used the ping trick to keep the connection open. Sometimes power-saving makes it so that SSH is unresponsive to incoming connectons entirely, even though wifi is up and running.

same here - except for me that is always the case (with power save on intermediate or max, I can never connect on ssh unless I run a ping from the phone to my router first). I've got around it by creating scripts to set up a reverse ssh tunnel to my home PC each time the phone switches from GPRS -> wifi or vice versa. That way, I can always ssh into the phone whenever required and it will always respond. I don't notice any greart additional power drain with the tunnel always open (though I haven't really tried to quantify this so very subjective).

Thanks for the suggestion, MT (reminds me of that word play "O I C U R M T", but I digress ).

I set to intermediate power-saving and 10mW power, and working as good as when I was pinging. I'm sure I'll have to up th TxPwr when I next get Wifi, as it's unlikely to be right outside my door as with this hotel.

I would like to see the default power-saving for WiFi connections set to Intermediate instead of Maximum, unless there's a way to make Maximum more reliable.

I will suggest this for the CSSU.

I imagine that for noobs this default could be rather problematic, and bad defaults need to be fixed.

I've logged a bug:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12237

The beacon interval and dtim interval setting on your access point determines the latency for clients accessing it with max powersave. I have it set to 100ms, 1. This makes latency hover at around 80-120ms when N900 is pinged from desktop over wifi.

so you're all talking about disabling power saving when using wifi. but how about when using 2g/3g cell signal? is there any power saving issue on that as well?

since now i'm also using this ping-trick whenever i use pidgin, and it's proven to be working (when not using it, i found a connection timeout error everytime. could be my phone operator has very slow data connection, but still with ping-trick, it works)