Best way to test latency?

[zenman]

What is the best way to test my latency? Is the one on testmy.net a good, accurate one? It gives you locations to choose from for the test -- Miami, NY, Tokyo, google, amazon, etc. Which location should I use? I'm in central Florida. How much latency should I expect on my Hughes connection?

[maratsade]

No way around the laws of physics, so the latency can't be changed. When you experience slowdowns they're likely related to the other causes on the list, all of them things you have basically no control over.  

What do you do when you experience slowdowns?  Do you ever try to reboot your modem? That's a strategy that sometimes helps. 

[MarkJFine]

How to read:
The number at the left is the hop number.

Hop 1 is 192.168.42.1, your modem.

Hops 2 and 3 are the HughesNet path to the gateway (thought there should be another one somewhere).

Hop 4 is Qwest (now owned by CenturyLink), your gateway provider.

Use 525mS as an easy to remember guide, because the radio path takes that much time to go to from you to the satellite, down to the groundstation, and then the return trip back to you.

These are all showing about 1-1.5 seconds more than that, which sounds to me like either a network compatibility problem or simple network congestion (congestion being too many users, causing a processing/routing backlog). CenturyLink is well-known for sporadic 1-minute gaps in service, not 1 second, so it's not the provider.

It could feasibly be peak time congestion, but it'd have to be pretty congested and I'd have to see what one of these looks like during a non-congested period. If it's that high (readings of 1500-2000mS) during non-peak time, then it's not congestion, it's a network compatibility issue.

But again, I don't know what tracepath is actually doing. I'm working from the assumption that it's something similar to traceroute and I might be wrong.

[zenman]

MarkjFine, So one doesn't add up the ms values on each hop to determine one's total round-trip latency? But rather, the ms value at far right on each of those lines (i.e. 1471.185ms on the third hop 3 line) reperesents a total round trip latency?

When I do a ping command, I get ms numbers on the right of each line in the 600-900 range, which seems more expected. Does that indicate that those 1-1.5 sec. values on each line after a tracepath command are probably not accurate? Or is the ping command not  accurate?

When you talk of the possibility of a network compatibility problem, what networks are you talking about? I'm a guy in central florida using my Hughes service to ping amazon.com, why would any of the networks used to execute that very common route for me have incompatibility issues?

[MarkJFine]

Each one on the right is basically a ping from you to that hop's location. It does three to each one so you can get an idea of the variance. In a traceroute, all three are on one line, but these have each on a separate line.

As I said, I don't exactly know what your tracepath is doing. If you can ping to any of those hop locations manually and get lower values, then there's something wrong with tracepath.

Lots of things can cause incompatibilities - packet size, MTU, what the network expects to see versus what you're generating... and when I say 'the network' I mean your local LAN (basically your Chromebook, since that's the only thing on it) versus what HugheNet's WAN expects (everything between the modem and the groundstation), versus what the groundstation's provider (Qwest) and the overall internet expects.

There are basically three different segments I'm grouping into the greater network here - which is why I keep saying knowing what's going on at each node in that chain is important. But if tracepath is broken and you have no access to a working traceroute, then it's just going to give you bad data.

[zenman]

MarkjFine, you said, "If you can ping to any of those hop locations manually," don't know for sure if this is what you mean, but I tried this:

My second hop was host977219357.direpc.com. I tried a ping command to that, then I tried 977219357direpc.com, and finally I tried just direpc.com. All three returned with 'name or service not known.' I also tried a tracepath command with all three of those, same result.

I guess my first problem is nobody in the conversation knows for certain how to do a traceroute with a chromebook. What I found via googling is that tracepath is how you do a traceroute on a chromebook, but I have no expertise to know if that's right, and applies to what we are using it for. 

[maratsade]

"I guess my first problem is nobody in the conversation knows for certain how to do a traceroute with a chromebook. "

You were told how to run a tracepath on a Chromebook.  So yes, we know how to do it; but it's not our fault if the tracepath command may be buggy. That's for Google to fix. 

[GabeU]

@zenman 

Is there any possibility of borrowing a Windows or Mac based device from someone to run a traceroute?  Something seems "off" with those tracepath results, or at least in comparison to your ping tests.  

Just for info, my traceroutes and pings are almost always comparable.

[MarkJFine]

It may require superuser access on a Chromebook to run traceroute.

Did you try typing "su" then hitting return before running traceroute, like I said way back?

[zenman]

I tired typed 'su' and it returned as 'unkown command."

[maratsade]

Because su is not a Crosh command. 

[MarkJFine]

what about 'sudo traceroute'

[maratsade]

No, not a Crosh command. Here's a list of commands for Crosh. 

EDIT: while many Linux commands work,  including sudo, it doesn't work with tracepath.  And there's no tracert or traceroute command for Crosh that I know of.  It's just tracepath (EDIT 2: poor, wonky, maligned, possibly buggy, tracepath).

[MarkJFine]

What about:

1. Exiting the Crosh shell first using 'exit',

2. Switching to a bash shell using 'shell',

3. Then doing 'sudo traceroute'. -> might want to try just 'traceroute' first.

[maratsade]

He should definitely try that. I'll test all this when I'm back at the firm and can get to the Chromebook. (Edit: though I thougth a bash shell is for running scripts....dunno, never used this on the Chromebook)

[MarkJFine]

Nice page... bookmarked.

Incidentally, look at the ftp definition of 'hash'... crafty little buggers.

[maratsade]

"Only functional in Amsterdam."  LOL

[zenman]

An exit command in crosh literally closes it The browser window disappears, haha. I found guidance on the net that a shell command in crosh will take you to the root linux shell, so I tried that, but it returned 'unknown command.' I dunno,I give up for now. I will eventualy have a chance to bring a windows laptop to this location. I will have the chromebook at a place with cable internet service later next week, and I'll try pinging and tracepathing there, just to see what happens.

[Liz]

Good morning zenman,

It's been a while since we last heard from you, so we will close this thread. If you still have concerns, please start a new thread and include a detailed explanation so we can better assist you.

Thanks,

Liz