This article describes our Router test procedures for both wired and wireless routers.

In our final Part 2, we look at two off-the-shelf ways to control up and downstream bandwidth.

NIC Teaming can increase server reliability and bandwidth.

Most consumer routers are no help in controlling bandwidth black holes. But in the first part of our series, we look at a router distro that can provide some easy relief.

Link aggregation is easy to set up and is a quick fix for bandwidth bottlenecks.

A free tool from SolarWinds makes it easy to remotely power on your PC.

Having introduced Iperf and Jperf, as well as covering details on TCP throughput tests by adjusting Window Size values, it's time to complete this series with comments on adjusting MSS and Buffer Length values. I'm also going to touch on using the results of Jperf testing to make changes to a PC to improve network performance.

Free and openly available, Iperf is a command line tool useful for measuring network performance. In my last post, I introduced some basic command line instructions to run Iperf between two endpoints and showed how the tool can be used to generate and measure both TCP and UDP performance. This time, I'll discuss Iperf's graphical cousin: Jperf.

One of the cool things about networks is there are many free tools to work with if you know where to look and how to use them. I've looked at a couple free network tools on this blog so far, including Wireshark and NetMeter. This time, I'm going to take a look at another network tool known as Iperf, a network performance tool used for measuring the bandwidth and the performance of TCP and UDP data flows between two endpoints.

With all the component and configuration options for constructing and managing a small network, it is important to numerically evaluate network performance. Performance measurements provide facts and statistics about the amount of data on your network and identify opportunities for improvement. Without measuring performance, the only indications of functionality are simple up and down states, as well as subjective statements based on user experience.

To manage any network over a period of time, it is useful to measure normal activity, as well as high and low traffic activity. Good network management involves metric based information on the volumes of traffic and various component performance levels. This is often referred to as "baselining" your network and establishing network benchmarks.