Traceroute question

[Retired_member41]

Hi

Below are two sets of traces

I know there are different factors, but can anyone shed any light as to which would be a best guess as to which one is likely to have the better results.

There have been slightly quicker traces but these are both typical.

A1 dac

/root$ traceroute dac.nic.uk
traceroute to dac.nic.uk (213.248.242.37), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 0.568 ms 0.581 ms 0.605 ms
2 peering. 0.768 ms 0.820 ms 0.878 ms
3 linx.nominet.org.uk 4.134 ms 4.113 ms 4.090 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *

A1 epp

/root$ traceroute epp.nominet.org.uk
traceroute to epp.nominet.org.uk (213.248.242.39), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 0.582 ms 0.583 ms 0.618 ms
2 peering 0.878 ms 1.021 ms 1.077 ms
3 linx.nominet.org.uk 1.580 ms 1.612 ms 1.598 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *

B1 dac

/root$ traceroute dac.nic.uk
traceroute to dac.nic.uk (213.248.242.37), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.330 ms 0.357 ms 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.318 ms
2 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.522 ms 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.322 ms 0.344 ms
3 linx.nominet.org.uk 0.357 ms 0.327 ms 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.295 ms
4 linx.nominet.org.uk 0.390 ms 0.368 ms *
5 * * *
6 * * *

B1 epp

/root$ traceroute epp.nominet.org.uk
traceroute to epp.nominet.org.uk (213.248.242.39), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.358 ms 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.386 ms 0.384 ms
2 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.380 ms 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.345 ms 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.348 ms
3 linx.nominet.org.uk (0.0.0.0) 0.363 ms 0.367 ms 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 0.284 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *


ip addresses showed up on B results, taken out for question purposes only.

Thanks, honest non misleading answers only please

 

[monaghan]

Traceroutes are complex to interpret as you have no idea of the actual traffic on the routers at any one time.

You can try mtr which will give you results over a longer period of time, if you watch over a period of time you will also see the Nominet response times get worse and then return to normal (guessing that will be the time of a drop!)

The round trip time to Nominet's border router is where you want to be timing to, other routers will influence results and depending on configuration may well shape ICMP to a lower priority when busy.

Unless you have your own dedicated link then traffic is going to have to share with other users making the traceroute / mtr only an estimate anyway.