Traveling Through a Network

     I have done many ping tests while gaming online but have little experience with Traceroutes. Pings confirm the connectivity between two devices (computers or servers) on a network and also lets you know the latency between the two. In other words it tells you the length of time it takes to receive a response from the destination of the ping. My goal when gaming was always to find a server with a ping less than 20ms. The ping to google was by far the fastest average speed at 28.860ms. second fastest was the .JP site at 87.652ms and the slowest was the .CZ site at 197.354. What I find odd with these ping tests is that the .CZ ping had the lowest deviation at 3.025ms. Google was second with a 6.991ms Deviation. Comparatively the .JP site had an astronomical deviation at 59.840ms.

Traceroutes track the pathways of packets from a source to a destination. They also indicate the amount of time it takes the packets between each hop along a network until they reach their destination. Two of the traceroutes I ran were similar. Neither the Google and .CZ trace routes maxed out the 64 hops, but the .JP one did, and the .JP test had 53 timeouts. The .CZ had 4 timeouts and completed in 13 hops. The Google Traceroute only had one timeout and completed in 15 hops. What is interesting is that many of the early hops too .JP site were quite fast but wound up maxing out the hops and did not complete due to the only 11 completed hops and 53 timeouts. The .CZ test was quite fast until it left Sacramento to Prague. That hop took the longest obviously because it was traveling across the ocean either by satellite or the underwater telecommunication lines, and was the farthest hop.

A few reasons pings and traceroutes can timeout or fail would be security or firewall settings at the destination or one of the hops on a trace route, the remote host could be down, or your own firewall settings could be the issue. To further investigate I would first try a different destination. If the tests are good to a different destination, you know the issue lies with the initial destination. If it fails or times out again, your connectivity is most likely the issue.