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Our router was bought for about $60 from Radioshack about 6 years ago... quite a while. Sometimes the internet gets really choppy, and I always attributed it to RoadRunner, but now I'm wondering if it could be the router.

How can I test the router's performance?

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  • One good way is to test with and without the router. Apr 24, 2012 at 5:27

2 Answers 2

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you want to test the link speed tests or WAN-LAN test??

If what you want is to do a link speed test, then iperf is an excellent tool. You can get the windows binary for iperf here.

What you basically is inject the link with data and get the effective bandwidth. You can get the bottleneck bandwidth with it.

Hope it will help..

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to test the performance of the router

1.Routing Throughput - Setup

To test whether your router can keep up with your Internet connection, you can't use the connection itself. Instead, you need to set up a test network that is disconnected from the Internet. As the simple diagram below shows, one of the computers will be connected via Ethernet to the WAN port of the router (WAN-side computer) and the other connects to one of the LAN switched ports (LAN-side computer). You can use any port, it doesn't matter. You must use Ethernet to connect the computers; wireless won't work.

2.Set WAN Port IP Address

To do this, we'll need to get to the router's admin server.

1) Connect power to the router under test and let it boot.

2) Go to the LAN-side computer plugged into one of the router LAN ports. Unless you set the computer to use a static IP address, it will have grabbed a new IP address from the router's DHCP server. If you already know the IP address of the router, you can just open a web browser, enter the IP address and log into the router. If you don't know the IP address of the router, go read the user manual or Google/Bing it, then log in.

I'm using a Cisco/Linksys E4200 for my test router. Like all Linksys routers, its admin server is located at 192.168.1.1.

3) You need to navigate to the settings for the WAN port. Unfortunately, different routers keep this information in different places. It is usually called Internet Connection Type or something similar. In a Linksys/Cisco, it's right on the Setup > Basic Setup page.

The WAN IP needs to be set to a different network range than the LAN side of the router, but still using a private IP address range. The easy way to do this is to take the router address, i.e. the IP address of the router admin server and change the third and fourth address octets. (An octet is each group of numbers separated by "." in the IP address.)

.You don't need to enter Default Gateway or DNS information unless the router makes you, which the E4200 did by throwing an error when I tried to save the settings. You can enter the same number for both these, using the same first three octets as the Internet Address, but a different number for the fourth octet. I used 192.168.10.1 as my Default Gateway, which got past the E4200's error detection.

4) Be sure to save the settings!

3.Put The LAN-side Computer In DMZ

A router's NAT firewall keeps unrequested data from the WAN side of the router from getting to the LAN side. To test WAN-to-LAN throughput, however, we need to shut off this defense. This is done by putting the LAN-side machine in the router's DMZ.

1) From the LAN-side computer, navigate to the router's DMZ setting. In the E4200, this is found in the Applications & Gaming > DMZ tab 2) Enter the IP address of the LAN side computer as the DMZ machine.

3) Save the setting.

4.Set the WAN-side Computer IP Address

You'll need to get to the Local Area Connection Status window for the computer's Ethernet adapter. There are lots of ways to do this and the exact sequence depends on which version of Windows you are using. The most reliable way is via the Control Panel. Do the following on the WAN-side computer:

1) In XP, click Network Connections in the Control Panel window 2)In Win 7, you want Network and Sharing Center 3) Once you get to either place, click or double-click the Local Area Connection link for your Ethernet adapter. In the Local Area Connection Status window that opens, click the Properties button. In the Local Area Connection Properties window that opens , double-click the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) properties (XP) or Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) properties (Win7) item to open its Properties window. 4) In the TCP/IP Properties window, enter an IP address in the same range as the router WAN IP. This means the IP address is the same as you entered for the router WAN IP address, with only the fourth octet changed to a different number between 1 and 253. 5) Save the setting and close all the TCP/IP and Network Connection properties windows.

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