Analysing Traceroute Information

Hi

I know what the use of trace route is and how we can troubleshoot an issue using this command. But I still have doubt regarding the Round trip time which is taking place between two hops.

Basically this command send three trace packets to the next hops and gets three similar or different results.


Tracing route to firewall.cx [204.157.10.72]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.144.108.1
2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 80.227.128.29
3 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 13.144.107.10
4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 14.144.107.2
5 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 14.144.109.11
6 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 14.0.0.252
7 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 217.132.50.97
8 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 218.132.54.52
9 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 10.0.0.26
10 2 ms 1 ms 2 ms 80.227.0.133
11 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 195.229.28.101
12 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms [195.229.31.98]
13 8 ms 7 ms 4 ms 195.229.0.221
14 141 ms 143 ms 145 ms 195.229.0.118
15 142 ms 143 ms 141 ms j1.ams.sc.net [195.69.145.42]
16 229 ms 227 ms 284 ms ae1.604.j3.iad.scnet.net [205.234.191.253]
17 227 ms 226 ms 228 ms ge2-7.b2.iad.scnet.net [66.225.244.210]
18 228 ms 233 ms 230 ms unknown.iad.scnet.net [66.225.244.194]
19 219 ms 219 ms 217 ms eqash53.defenderhosting.com [204.157.0.249]
20 219 ms 218 ms 218 ms ns1.datavision.gr [204.157.10.72]

Trace complete.

C:\Documents and Settings\bennyj>

The confusion is round trip time which we get across each hop is recursive or just it is RTT between two hops.

For example check the 16th and 17 th hop. In 16th hop the RTT is 229 and in 17th it is 227.

Can anyone explain me what exactly these round trip time values which is occurring between each hops.

Regards
Benny

hi,
the RTT info that you see in tracert results, is between the two subsequent hops. say the the ICMP packet is travelling between node X and node Y while travelling across a network source and a destination, the RTT is calculated between node X and node Y, and that is sent back to the source. this is not the RTT between source and node Y or source and node X. if you want further info regarding path latency and network loss at intermidiate nodes, you can use pathping. systax for pathping and tracert are more or less similar.

Hi Arani,
sorry but I am not geting your ans. Can u explain.......
Can you give more detail on pathping? :oops:

Hi VK,
Basically the Tracerout will not send three packet to the next hope. It will send an ICMP packet to the next hope to find the whether the subsequent router is alive r not.

The Round Trip Timer (RTT) referes that the time taken by the source to send an ICMP request to destination and receive the ACK. The RTT is splitted into three part, it shows the Min, Avg and Max times to do the above task.

C:\>tracert google.com

Tracing route to google.com [64.233.187.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.116.87.130
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.116.1.2
3 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 61.95.165.2
4 2 ms 3 ms 6 ms 61.246.219.5
5 3 ms 2 ms 3 ms 59.145.148.98
6 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms 61.95.175.85
7 11 ms 8 ms 9 ms 202.56.223.13
8 249 ms 246 ms 300 ms 203.208.147.113
9 247 ms 247 ms 253 ms 203.208.149.57
10 248 ms 254 ms 249 ms 72.14.197.165
11 247 ms 239 ms 239 ms 209.85.130.6
12 321 ms 302 ms 302 ms 66.249.95.212
13 298 ms 293 ms 292 ms 72.14.236.19
14 306 ms 307 ms 306 ms 216.239.49.226
15 302 ms 303 ms 302 ms 64.233.187.99

Trace complete.

in the above example the

first timer is - MIN time
second is - Avg time
third - Max time

Hope it will helps you.



Regards,
Dove

hi, sorry about the delay,
follow Dove's explanation, that's sufficient
cheers

first timer is - MIN time
second is - Avg time
third - Max time
Dove

I want to point out that the above is incorrect. The three timings are not min/avg/max. You can see that if you observe the values carefully. It is just timings from 3 different packets.

Also, the hop timings are the time it takes from the "source" (e.g. your computer) to that particular numbered hop/router. It is not the difference between the hops. If you want the difference, you will have to subtract the values between the hops.

While doing so, do note that some routers do intentionally delay ICMP ping packets. So there maybe an intermediate router giving very large timings, although a ping to the final destination would show shorter timings.

Pathping combines both Ping and Tracert. The advantage of pathping is that it provides information about lost packets and may indicate which router is dropping packets.

I hope this helps.