Slow tracert, but still low times on the reply.

[Bi0haZarD]

been having bad pings in the various games i play, no matter where the server is located.. finally decided to look into the matter.... first thing that popped my curiosity was tracert... probably not related to the issue at hand, but would help to eliminate this from my "possible causes" list.

1. Router: WRT54GL + Tomato Firmware (Latest version) http://synapse.kicks-ass.net/tomato/

2. Only happens on (tested) Vista and ME. XP Home and XP pro are uneffected.

3. all computers are wired, and same results if its just 1 computer on (so no P2P traffic going on or anything)

first and foremost a tracert to a random game server (BF2)..

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2OfZUA1J_U

Output:

C:\Users\Phil>tracert 64.34.184.96

Tracing route to 1wgn1.wolfservers.com [64.34.184.96]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms 1 ms 192.168.0.1

2 10 ms 10 ms 7 ms 10.118.220.1

3 56 ms 81 ms 26 ms 65.156.67.60.cpe.cableone.net [67.60.156.65]

4 10 ms 11 ms 9 ms 64-128-89-241.static.twtelecom.net [64.128.89.241]

5 73 ms 73 ms 77 ms 66.192.240.22

6 73 ms 74 ms 75 ms 10ge.ten1-2.wdc-sp2-cor-1.peer1.net [216.187.115.234]

7 74 ms 74 ms 73 ms 216.187.116.234

8 80 ms 79 ms 77 ms 1wgn1.wolfservers.com [64.34.184.96]

Trace complete.

anyone have any ideas of what could be causing this?

*edit* looks like it's caused by slow hostname lookup, pathping does the same thing, and only thing i can think of is for some reason the Vista and ME machines can't resolve the hostname so it eventually times out.

Edited April 22, 2008 by Bi0haZarD

[Yochanan]

Anything under 100 ms is excellent, I'm not sure what you mean by slow. Maybe try OpenDNS if you think your ISP's DNS servers aren't responding fast enough.

[Bi0haZarD]

i meant in how long it takes for the command prompt to show it, (watch the video).

it's a problem with hostname resolving, and since it's happening onmy router along with the 10.118 ip it's something caused by vista.. i'll have to look around on the net for an answer...

tried opendns just for the hell of it and tried tracert'ing random websites that i've never visted just to verify... same problem.

[+BudMan MVC]

You have no idea how traceroute works do you.. The response time for the command to print its results are not indicative of the the time it take to that specific hop.

I would suggest you take a look at how traceroute works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute

Are you trying to say that your traceroute takes longer on vista than on xp??

[Bi0haZarD]

i looked into tracert a long time ago (was still on 98 or ME at the time lol), so my memory was foggy when i made this thread.

and not the actual response ms, but rather the hostname lookup. if i do the same tracert on any of my xp machines each hostname lookup comes up rather fast.. whereas with both my vista machines run about 7 seconds on the hostname lookup.

didn't mean to make tracert sound like the problem when i made this thread.. but figured it would've shown at least some clue as too why my game pings skyrocket randomly..

[+BudMan MVC]

Do you have IPv6 enabled? Maybe vista is doing ipv6 queries for the name first, which is part of your delay?

I just did a trace to google on xp and vista at the exact same time.. And there was no more than a second difference in when they finish - vista is running on a virtual machine, so I give it a bit of slack for it to finish.

Now on linux running on on a virtual machine on the same host that is still running the vista box -- the same trace pops back in like 1/4 of the time for either the xp or vista box to finish.

If you feel the resolving the names is an issue, then use the -d flag

Usage: tracert [-d] [-h maximum_hops] [-j host-list] [-w timeout] target_name

Options:

-d Do not resolve addresses to hostnames.

if you do not resolve names doing it on linux it pops!! Still not sure what your question is, so the command takes longer to run on vista then XP or 9x??? So??

As I already stated the time it takes for the command to finish is not indicative of the results.. Which will be shown -- are you saying your seeing faster response times to the hops while using xp vs vista?

As already stated your trace does not show any problems to the host.. If your looking for more info on if there could be a problem on one of the hops try using pathping -- will give you lots more info.

[Bi0haZarD]

Disabling IPv6 resolved the issue, thanks Budman. Hopefully that also helped my bad ping spikes in games, but i doubt it had any effect.

tracert -d <ip> would go at the same speed as my XP boxes.. The ms per hop averages were about the same between the XP and Vista machines, but only the resolving the hostname part was taking forever.

sorry for the confusion, i can't really type out what i think easily lol.

[+BudMan MVC]

Unless you have a specific use for IPv6 -- I see no reason to have it enabled. It has been causing some strange issues for people to be sure.