What is traceroute?

[boron]

Asked in this (http://www.publisherforums.com/showthread.php?t=456) thread but noone answered yet: What is traceroute and how to read it properly? What can someone conclude from traceroute times shown. Don't send a link to Wikipedia, please. ;)

[darkcrunk]

There is nothing much to read *correctly*. When you use the command on DOS or on other applications, you see a number of hosts and nodes.

It just displays the name of the nodes/hosts ( places ) the data gets through, before it reaches its destination.

Example :

Say.. you want to upload a photo in Yahoo.com :)

Your browser sends the photo as "packets" of information. The destination is the Yahoo.com server and it passes through a lot of gateways and filters, etc ..

TraceRoute displays all of those :)

The time that is being displayed is actually the time taken for the "packet" to go and come back

[rjp]

It simply shows how packets travel to reach the destination address along with the time it takes to get there.

Basically you're seeing every router that packets go through to reach the specific destination address. In some cases routers drop ICMP packets (the type traceroute uses) so in some cases you might not get anything back.

The biggest use is when you're trying to troubleshoot a network issue and you're trying to pinpoint where the failure is.

[boron]

It was recommended to me to use Traceroute test instead of PING to determine the "hosting speed". From explanation in this thread (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=206123)I can't figure out much.

THe whole point is: I was disadvaced (!) to order a hosting from one Canadian hosting, since a PING from my place in Europe to their servers would be slow because of distance. I asked my friends from China, India and Australia to ping them and we all got the same results. Then we tried with traceroute - the same results again.

I just suspect now that PING and traceroute cannot be used as a test of a hosting speed.

[Mystic]

Yes. As I said before, to determine hosts speed, find a website with same hosting, and check its loading speed via the services you mentioned here (http://www.publisherforums.com/showpost.php?p=4282&postcount=11).

[rjp]

Yeah using PING and traceroute to determine if someone is a quality host is useless. ;)