The common-rail injectors are the most critical component of the CRDI diesel engines that dominantly affect engine performances through high pressure injection with exact control. Thus, from now on the advanced combustion technologies for common-rail diesel injection engine require high performance fuel injectors. Accordingly, the previous studies on the numerical and experimental analysis of the diesel injector have focused on a optimum geometry to induce proper injection rate. In this study, computational predictions of performance of the diesel injector have been performed to evaluate internal flow characteristics for various needle lift and the spray pattern at the nozzle exit. To our knowledge, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the internal flow passage of an entire injector duct including injection and return routes has never been studied. In this study, major design parameters concerning internal routes in the injector are optimized by using a CFD analysis and Response Surface Method (RSM). The computational prediction of the internal flow characteristics of the common-rail diesel injector was carried out by using STAR-CCM+7.06 code. In this work, computations were carried out under the assumption that the internal flow passage is a steady-state condition at the maximum needle lift. The design parameters are optimized by using the L16 orthogonal array and polynomial regression, local-approximation characteristics of RSM. Meanwhile, the optimum values are confirmed to be valid in 95% confidence and 5% significance level through analysis of variance (ANOVA). In addition, optimal design and prototype design were confirmed by calculating the injection quantities, resulting in the improvement of the injection performance by more than 54%.