Why do traceroutes take so long

Traceroute, also called tracepath or tracert, is a network tool used to determine the "path" packets take from one IP address to another. It provides the hostname, IP address, and the response time to a ping. Enter the IP address that you want to lookup. The traceroute command operates similarly to ping.

The type of packet that is sent differs depending on the implementation. It means the given router didn't acknowledge the packet and the request timed out instead. A traceroute displays the path that the signal took as it traveled around the Internet to the website.

It also displays times which are the response times that occurred at each stop along the route. If there is a connection problem or latency connecting to a site, it will show up in these times. One of the simplest ways to identify IP address is by using the command prompt on windows devices. The Traceroute test a. The test results provide a list of hosts or IP addresses showing the route of the test packets starting from the selected monitoring location to the destination Domain or IP.

When I connect through my mobile hotspot, these websites can be accessed. So it is not the problem with my laptop, not the problem with my hosting at least I think so and finally my ISP replied that it is not their problem as well!

So I have no idea what exactly is the problem. It is quite frustrating to use my mobile hotspot whenever I have to update anything on my blog. I have attached tracert output for my site. If anyone can help in in this regard that would be amazing. Looking forward to your reply. Thanks in advance. This will block connections from your wifi, but let you get through to the site on your mobile provider, or the coffee shop down the street, or someone else checking the site for you on the other side of the world.

I wrote up an article describing our most common version of the situation here at InMotion : sometimes, an email client like Outlook or Mac Mail with the wrong password will keep trying to log in to your email. The security software reads that as a hacking attempt because someone is repeatedly attempting to login and failing and blocks the IP address for a period of time ranging from 15 minutes to a few days.

Usually, the solution is to go through all of the email clients on devices connected to your network. It happens all the time on 5. What can I do to fix this problem? Hi, thank you for your question. You may want to contact your ISP to see if there are network issues causing the packet loss.

I am on wired connection in an apartment complex. Could it just be network congestion? Based on that traceroute, it indeed looks like network congestion. Please, can you help me with this? And why I have a request timed out there? Thank you.

As explained in the article, some timeouts may occur, but it is normal. The timeouts in the beginning pretty much the same as the ones elsewhere in the report. If a firewall is blocking request at any of the hops , then it will be reported as a timeout. The IP addresses are the location of the hops.

By the way, your traceroute is tracing the route to yahoo. I hope that helps to clarify the issue. Oh, thank you very much for your quick response. Thank you again. For example: 10g The rest of the domain looks like a custom sub-domain, though. Traceroutes are designed to check the route that your computer uses to connect to a remote server.

You may need to speak to your internet provider for more information. You may also want to try running the traceroute from another location in your area and see if it shows the same results. That way you can show the issue to your internet service provider and ask for the reason for the difference. I hope that helps to answer your question! If you require further assistance please let us know!

There are aorund hops coming in between. Why does that happen? I tried reaching all of them. Hi, unfortunately, we are unable to diagnose your tracert based on the details you have provided. Do you have an example output from that command? Is there a particular question you have regarding your report? The details above seem to indicate no issues with your middle hops and the timeouts at the end can have various reasons that do not necessarily indicate an issue.

Could you please explain to me if my isp is the problem or just my pc thanks. The traceroute you provided indicates no appreciable loss of packets for typical web hosting services. Can you look at the traceroute below and tell me if everything is alright? Trace Statistics : traceroute to 8. According to the article above, the traceroute does not appear to be displaying issues with your connection.

What can I do? Sorry for your frustration with this. The traceroute indicates that you are able to get out of your house but not much further. Tell them that a host would only be able to resolve routing issues that occur near the hosting servers.

I hope this helps to clarify the issue for you. Either that or I get disconnected from the server, which is more common. WinMTR statistics. No response from host — 0 0 0 0 0. WinMTR v0. Then a TranceRT to the same server while palying on it and you can see packet loss all across the board:. I live overseas in the Philippines, so high latency is to be expected while playing in a US server.

I recommend contacting your ISP with these details to ensure that your subscription to their services aligns with the quality of your connection. Otherwise, there may be a limitation in place with the server you are connecting to causing the issue. It does not appear to have an issue but does not appear to be normal. It seems that the priority at some routers may be set lower, therefore causing a longer ping time just for those hops. Hello, I am having issues with my internet connection. I seem to be experiencing packet loss but I would like to be sure before jumping to conclusions.

I ran a few tracert commands and the output looks very inconsistent. Additionally, when I ping 8. Here are some tracert outputs.

It does not appear that you are experiencing any latency issues. Timeouts can be displayed due to the implementation of some servers. Microsoft Windows [Version Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Zeitangaben in Millisek. This does not appear to be a full traceroute report. Do you have a complete traceroute?

A traceroute is essentially just pinging each hop along your route 3 times allowing you to compare the results for discrepancies. Thank you, John-Paul. If you are getting a return from the destination then yes, it is normal.

Make sure that you are also able to ping that location. They will be able to get a clear picture of your connection to the server. As per the article above, latency in your connection is typically when you are very large time values triple digits on a consistent basis in some part of the trace.

If you have any further questions or comments, please let us know. Could you explain what the ms is showing is it the ping from the previous router to the next one. Why would my total ping be quicker than one of the steps? Could you help me intepret this tracert? To me it looks like an issue for the receiving end their servers and not my ISP nor my network is the issue. I have tried many different things including port forwarding, opening up NAT, using a different modem, etc.

Any help is appreciated. The traceroute you have provided looks normal. The double-digit times indicate typical route times. The timeouts could be a device that is simply not returning the time and the route does make it to the destination. I would advise that you speak with the technical support team for your gaming server.

I was hoping you guys could help me figure this issue out. I pay for 20mb so you can see my frustration. We use a point to point internet line of sight so I believe the issue lies with Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I recommend you complete the tracert multiple times over a few minutes up to an hour patterns of fluctuation. As this is closer to your local network and far from ours, this should help you and your internet service provider get a better idea of your average network speed.

Any idea why my search does not display clear ip addresses? More something like [2aeae]. Please let us know if you have any further questions. Sorry for that traceroute — it indicates an internet connectivity issue at your location. You may need to contact your Internet Service Provider in order to trouble the issue.

Make sure that you have run the query correctly. If the diagnostic tool has been implemented correctly then this issue is not a problem with the hosting service, but possible with your connection to internet or local network in general. Times will vary based on traffic flowing through the routers at the time that you are running the test.

Please refer to the article above for how to read your traceroute and understand the times that you are seeing. This tracert is actually better looking than the usual.

Usually at the height of the problem, hop 2 or 3 jumps to ms and stays that way the whole way through. I was able to ping hop number 4 and i was seeing around a 50ms delay, I tried to ping hop 3 and it was dropped so it may not be responding right now, Your issue is with hop 2 or 3 which would be your ISP, You could try using a VPN to get around it however being that they are that close to your network there are likely no alternative routes for the traffic to go. There is nothing you will be able to do about this other than contacting your ISP.

It looks to me like after it reaches my isp, some kind of congestion lies there? I have no slowed speeds or issues connecting to anything, just high ping to everything within those peak usage hours. Thanks for the traceroute. While your times might appear to be a little slow as they get closer to the hosting server, the times may be only temporary or they may reflect latency that could be considered normal.

You will need to speak with your hosting provider and see if they consider the times to be abnormal. You may also need to speak with your ISP in order to determine if there are any routing issues. I reviewed the screenshots that you sent and your times never go above ms times. These times are NOT considered to be times that reflect high latency. The networks you route through will always have varying times based on the traffic that is passing through those networks. Your times are not always reflective of just your traffic.

Latency times that are indicative of a problem are closer to ms times consistently. You would need to speak with your ISP if the issue is close to your location. If the higher times are at the end of the traceroute, then that is indicative that there be latency issues closer to the hosting service. If that is the case, then you would need to notify your hosting service, provide the traceroute and ask if there is anything that they can do to fix the issue.

However, your times do not indicate any type of routing issue related to latency problems. My speeds and packet loss are consistently good, only my ping increases during peak times each night. I have tested through 3 different adresses using both MTR and tracert. Are you having issues reaching a particular IP address? You can use your IP address listed in cPanel to resolve to your site. For example: It looks like you are experiencing latency around hop 10 and I recommend reaching out to the provider to determine why.

We are not seeing any major issues in your traceroute test. I recommend performing a Ping test to see if you are losing packets. We can see in many trace routes the round trip times of some nodes higher than the nodes that are next to it. If we look at hops at 7 and 8 we can see the rtr of the 7th hop is higher than the 8th. Does tracert really traces the route or it does something else.

The times between these locations are NOT summarized by traceroute. If you want to know more about the science of it, then you will need to speak with a network engineer. Hi, Currently need assistance regarding with my connection my ISP saying that. We do not have any issue with my current connection but I do expirence slow connection when viewing google and some links which is weird. I tried to run an tracert to the said link that are having slow connection to them upon geting the issue.

It appears that your traceroute to that IP address is not experiencing anything out of the ordinary. The traceroute may indicate timeout errors, but that is typical for some systems that do not respond to record those details for security reasons. You may want to try to disable any active extensions you may have installed in your web browser or else browse in a private browsing session which disables extensions temporarily to see if the extensions running are causing some websites to load slowly.

Here is a link to a possible solution in the official microsoft support site. Hi I am having problems connecting to a website from my laptop and mobiles, I am not a computer expert but have managed on my laptop to do a traceroute, please can anyone see any issues as to why I cannot connect to www.

It looks like your connection is getting lost when it goes through the IP Looking everywhere for a solution I decided to run a trace route. The results are as follows:. So I am hoping someone can decipher this and let me know what they see. However, I suggest presenting this information to your ISP to determine if this kind of activity is typical for their network and the level of service you are subscribed to.

I typed tracert in cmd and then I saw 30 hops in there, but it completed in 16 rows, Is it problem? What a traceroute! We would need to see the traceroute in order to assess it. Typically, you should send the traceroute results to our live technical support team via an email ticket you can see the contact information at the bottom of the page.

The article above tells how to read the traceroute. I run a trace route on our domain name which the site is hosted not on our network. The trace gets to hop 10 and which is Who is responsible at that point. Sorry for the problem with the failed connection. However, you should submit the entire traceroute to our live support via email so that they can look at the routing. If the problem is within our control, then our systems team would address it.

I have a trace that was successful on attempts , then request timed out for attempts , and was successful on a final 15th attempt.

However, if you notice that the requests are taking a long time, you may want to contact your ISP to determine if they are just not responding to the traceroute requests or if they are actually taking too long.

I noticed that there was a spike early in the traceroute. The time went from between ms to over ms on the second hop. What does that indicate? Sorry to hear about the problems with your router and connecting to the server. As per the documentation above, if the issue is within the early hops of the trace route, then the issue is more likely a problem with your ISP Internet Service Provider.

If the problem were with your router, then ALL of your connections, regardless of where you connect would be slow or have some type of latency. Thanks for this, starting to help me understand. For my traces, the first hop is consistently 2, then the second jumps to anywhere between and , then hops 3 through 10 are generelly to Compared to others in this comment section, this seems quite high. There is also occasional packet loss between hops 4 and 7 when multiple traces are run on the same website.

What would be my best course of action? I recommend you contact your Internet Service Provider to discuss the speeds you are experiencing with the services you are buying from them.

Thank you for the excellent article! How can I determine which is the F5, etc? If you know where the domain was registered originally, you can also typically find services that allow you to determine if the domain is still properly registered.

Note that a URL for a website may be valid but not functioning due to other reasons such as a non-operational website. As per my understanding when request get forwarded to hope 4 i.

So is that something wrong with ISP forwarding request? Your traceroute looks fine, not all the routers your traffic goes through will respond to the ICMP request. The timeout would only be a problem when it starts timing out at a point and never picks up again. The reason you are most likely getting a connection timed out is because port 23 for telnet is not open in the firewall by default. As long as the traceroute is ending at the correct server in the end, then there does not appear to be anything wrong as indicated by the times in that traceroute.

Please get back to me as soon as possible, as I have not been able to use the internet on my computer very well. When you run a traceroute, you need to check the route going to your website. The trace you provided goes to our InMotion Hosting website which is not a server that hosts your website. The traceroute is for diagnosing the time to access your site from your location. Also, the ms times are not typically an indication of a problem.

They may be slightly slower than normal but will vary depending on when you run the traceroute. Our live technical support can analyze the report and provide you feedback confidentially instead of in a reply that is open to the public. Yet it works on cellular data or other networks. I advise checking with your service provider. Charlotte is likely a reference to the city in North Carolina. Unfortunately, I am uncertain how to assist you.

However, there does seem to be some sort of connectivity issue, such as latency in the following hop:. What kind of issues are you experiencing?

If you are an InMotion Hosting customer, you can reach out to our Live Support to trouble shoot issues with connections to your server. I hope this helps! Specific odd thing is on one tracert to a different site, also used regularly, it stopped at number five and showed:. Never saw that before.. I did a tracert then disable my network interface to see if my failover is worked.

Why does this happen? Did it reach the destination because I got backup ISP? Thanks before. You may want to consult with a network expert or network-specialized forum, as the article here is focused on reading traceroutes for website diagnostics. You said that the packet got through, so it does appear that the failover is working if it switched to your other ISP.

The timeouts have nothing to do with performance issues that you may be seeing. Even the hops from though they are showing triple digit, the numbers are not bad. If you are experiencing performance issues with performance, then it does not appear to be a result of the connection to the server. To check the below tracert that showing 4th and 5th getting timed out that websites is access to slowely?

I am just baffled by my Traceroute. Do you have any advice for me and what I can do to wipe this Traceroute clean? Not sure what else I can do. Ara, the results from your traceroute are in no way linked to programs installed on your local computer. What traceroute does is test your connection speeds at various points along your connection to a destination.

The handling of the packets in this test are done by your operating system, and are not affected by programs installed on your computer. What is the round-trip delay of the 3rd route?

Why is the delay not the same? Your Traceroute indicates an immediate issue upon leaving your house. If your problems persist contact your ISP internet service provider , and provide your traceroute as evidence of issues. Time outs are irrelevant if looked at by themselves. It is not necessarily due to a lack of response. You must look at the hops afterward. In your case, the hop afterward shows very good response time. Calculating end-to-end delay also known as one way delay is more complicated that simply taking the traceroute and using the numbers there.

The slowness on each and every path normally is because you have got DNS resolution turned on, and either some problem with DNS, or IP addresses without reverses on the path.

As someone else already stated, you can use the no resolution, -n in traceroute and -d in tracert. To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Best Answer. Bill This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional.

So basically it's a long process because it's waiting for timeouts for each hop on the way. View this "Best Answer" in the replies below ». Popular Topics in General Networking.