Any one know how to read traceroutes?

akapeacemaker

akapeacemaker

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I've tried to narrow down what's going on when I have particularly bad lag/ping spikes while playing BF3. There seem to be a couple bad hops in Illinois. What's considered an acceptable vs unacceptable packet loss percentage in gaming? I am seeing just over 2% packet loss over the duration of time indicated by this graph.
 
Ping plotter basically does this. What I know is that there are a couple of hops in IL that are pretty laggy for me. North of 100ms. Nothing I can do about it I guess.
 
I can read traceroutes but I don't use pingplotter much The problems with traceroutes these days is that allot of providers are dropping certain types of requests on routers.

I have an old program that came with Subspace that runs on my desktop called pingroute. Here is the data from that for me, for naval strike.

1 192.168.1.1 Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home 0 ms 0 ms 0 ms 6 ms 411 411 0%
2 104.153.105.225 c-104-153-105-225.managed-ded.premium-chicago.nfoservers.com 23 ms 22 ms 2 ms 29 ms 411 411 0%

that's low ping, av ping, high ping, number packets sent, number received and packetloss.


A traceroute is supposed to show you the hops but sometimes doesn't. Like for example this is my traceroute to the naval strike server.. (from windows command line this time)

C:\Windows\system32>tracert 104.153.105.225

Tracing route to c-104-153-105-225.managed-ded.premium-chicago.nfoservers.com [104.153.105.225]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 1 ms <1 ms Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 24 ms 78 ms 2 ms c-104-153-105-225.managed-ded.premium-chicago.nfoservers.com [104.153.105.225]

Trace complete.

2 hops really? But it's possible to have a low hop count depending on the peering agreements between providers. Maybe nfoservers.com is hosted on the Verizon backbone?

I used to love traceroute and pingroute for troubleshooting. The problem is that even if it does work, if the problem is 5 hops in to a 12 hop path, who are you going to call and complain to? WAY back in the day, almost everyone used the email address noc@domain.com... so i had about a 70% chance of emailing noc@middlehopdomain.com and getting a reply. Now that doesn't really work, and even if i don't get a mail bounce for bad address, they could give a shit about me and don't respond.

Now things have grown in size and complexity, and your really only choice of action assuming you don't have local issues, like 1st 2 hops, is to change providers and hope for the best.

2% packetloss for the whole trip is not bad at all. All games these days run on UDP not TCP, which is like streaming video. UDP is a connection stateless protocol that just bursts packets to you. If you get them you get them, if you don't you don't, and when you don't in a game like bf, that's when you see someone skipping a little, or they see you skipping.

Games don't even measure packetloss anymore, because they really don't care. Packets aren't going to be resent. So they focus on latency (packet transit time) and kind of assume that if your ping is low you have a good connection. The reality is if your ping is low, but your packetloss is high, you're lagging like a bitch :)
 
So what I would say is that the hop with a low 65, and high 123 (causing an average 65 ping) is most likely causing you grief. Anything after that hop is affected by that hop. This is a peering hand off from Windstream and ntt.net. This could be an overloaded router, or overloaded pipe, or a faulty connection. You could send this data to Windstream (somehow), but you're not a Windstream customer. It looks like you are a Nuvox customer. Here in lies the problem.

Depending on how important it is to you will dictate how much effort you put in to it. If you are in an area with sever isp's you could try changing isp's and they may have a different backbone provider, and therefor may change your path to this particular destination, but it's a shot in the dark. I don't know of any data you can look up before deciding that.

Oh and lastly, having a 100 ping to a game server shouldn't be a problem If you are sure it's a connection issue, all of the above is correct. Have you checked your pc though to make sure it's clean?
 
At this point switching ISPs is not an option. I just have to deal with it when it happens. I'm not worried about the 100 ping so much. If it was steady it wouldn't be an issue. It's the ping rollercoaster I can't handle when it starts acting up. Lag spikes are a bitch.
 
I have the same problem as yours, my problem is that my ISP use the same route to some Chicago server, when it hit Chicago, it add 100ms or more on top of my current ping.

When one of your route is bad, there is nothing much you can do, maybe call your isp, but I don't think they would care, there is a way to change your route, you need to use VPN, it can fix a bad route, u would need to find a vpn server really close to your location or one that gives you the best ping to whatever server you want to connect, if the vpn is good enough, u wont see any difference, but you would need to test each server to see the one that gives you the best result.

Before some1 reply saying that VPN would add lag to your connection, it can, but it can also give you better latency, like I said, by using different routes it can make your "ping" to whatever server travel fast.

You can try Windscribe free plan, see if it fix your route, but there is a data limit. The best VPNs without any restriction are "ProtonVPN" and "Private Internet Access".
 
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