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Boost performance on your router

I am a trainee network engineer with an ISP company. We have two routers (2600 and 3600) in the server room with which we provide our services. Lately, our download speed has greatly reduced and as if that was not enough, we even have problems accessing the Internet and I found out that the core router 2600 just might be the offending machine. I say this because anytime we experience difficulty in browsing, what I do to get back our link is to shut down that router and then boot up again after a few minutes. My question now is what can be responsible for this and how can I make the router perform to optimal level?

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The first thing you need to do is to make sure that the problem is the router. If it is a problem with the router it would probably be a problem with too much traffic going through your Internet connection.

When you receive slow download speed make sure to check the load level on the serial interface where you have a WAN connection. Do this my using the command "show interface serial xxxx" and look under the load utilization. If your load is between 200 and 255 then you have too much data being pushed out on the WAN. You may want to upgrade the bandwidth on your circuit. You can also use the command "show ip accounting" to see which devices within your network are communicating with devices outside your network and you can see how much bandwidth is used between the devices. There may be one workstation that is using most of the bandwidth on the link.

If you want to boost performance on your router look up some of the different forms of quality of service. I presently use custom based queuing on some routers in my network. Using queuing can stop certain computers form using up all the resources on a network.

This was first published in February 2003

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