Routing Performance

D-Link said that the 655's latest firmware incorporated changes to increase the number of simultaneous sessions—a factor of much interest to P2P fans. So I once again put the 655 through our suite of router tests, with the results shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Routing throughput

These throughput numbers dropped a bit from what I achieved with 1.02 firmware, but they are still impressive, putting the 655 in the #1 spot for WAN to LAN throughput and #2 for LAN to WAN and total simultaneous throughput, right behind the Linksys RVS4000. Use the Router Charts to see how the 655 stacks up against other routers.

Figure 8 shows what the throughput variation looks like on the simultaneous routing test.

Figure 8: DIR-655 simultaneous throughput test results

Even more impressive was that the 655 did indeed live up to D-Link's claims for simultaneous session handling. When Ixia recently generously upgraded my version of IxChariot to 6.40, they also increased the number of pairs from 180 to 200. I found that the 655 handled the 200 simultaneous sessions with ease and probably could have done more if I had the ability to try it! This is a first for any wired or wireless routers that I've tested.

Note that all testing was done with the QoS engine features disabled, but with SPI enabled. I encountered none of the SPI-related slowdowns that I encountered with the Linksys RVS4000.