latency diagnosis FAQ

[reaper]

Here is everything you need to know about traceroute.  Maybe this should be sticky somehow for network issues.  In any event the PDF attached is every single possible thing you could want to know about traceroute, from the PTR conventions to covering a great deal about latency limitations in networking.

With networks that don't highlight the intermediate hops, not by non-response, but by label switching, and the return path playing such a large role, diagnosing the provider to communicate with can be difficult.

For gaming I would suggest running mtr both ways (link below):
http://winmtr.net/

This way if the netgraph line goes high for a few seconds, we'll have a large enough sample to deal with it.  Unfortunately, if it's somewhat sporadic, ICMP limiting by the control plane may play a factor by not giving us information in our statistics gathering. 

While pathping is included in Windows, it has a problem of not continuing if ICMP doesn't return its first response.  As well UDP is probably less frequently blocked.  Going off the whois data in the IP address can be close to useless, as well traceroute can be, but here is the best shot.  Running MTR both ways, and identifying the providers to talk to has the recourse via:

1) notifying the provider
2) adjusting routing (unforunately might not happen, as I believe quadz could not lay the smack down on the providers before).

Use this in conjunction with common sense:

1) is this all servers
    local - reset your router, make sure your cat5 cable is OK, and NIC and switchport are set to auto-negotiate
2) is my game messed up locally (map q2dm1 in the console)
  stop uneeded processes and services - clean your PC of malware

Actually way more interesting than I thought it would be, as I thought I already knew everything about traceroute:
http://cluepon.net/ras/traceroute.pdf

For example linux traceroute add 666 for the mark of the beast!

FYI: on a tagent,
MPLS is the type of network that doesn't show the hop.  A label is put in between the layer 2 frames and layer 3 header.  This way routing table lookups don't take place and "switching" the packets is very fast and sometimes used in provider cores.  Also interesting, is the OSI model, where protocol data units are passed through seven layers, all the way down to an electro-magnetic signal representing a bit.