Ive recently been getting pings of 150 ish on the HH servers only, whereas i used to get around 40 ish. I did a traceroute, can anyone give me a diagnosis?



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Hey Alan,

Who's your ISP?

They have a bit of a routing issue by the look of it. Hops 5, 6 and 7 of your trace show addresses from Telia. Telia is a Swedish telco, and as far as I know, have no points of presence in the UK. It seems that your traffic is being routed via Sweden!

The really odd thing about this trace though is on hop 9, which shows a large incremental delay between 2 routers that belong to Level 3 (who are a backbone ISP). Its unusual that 2 routers belonging to the same ISP would do this, as they have monitoring software that would alert them to this sort of thing.

Either way, you should open a case with your ISP and show them this traceroute. I would even recommend you take several traces over time to see if the issue is consistent. They should be able to find out what's going on easily enough from this.

Cheers, 3F

Thanks 3F for the analysis!

My ISP is Eircom, the main guys in Ireland.

Sweden! Those Swedish spies are sappin mah internet.

TBH im loathe to start chasing down Eircom over this since im moving in a few weeks and changing ISP. I thought it might have been a problem on my end. I guess ill have to be happy playing medic and engineer for a while

I took this one a few seconds ago, so theres about an hours difference between the two. Both of the traceroutes show the exact same route, but this one is back to "normal". I didnt change anything, so im guessing it must be the net traffic thats choking me somehow. Theres a headscratcher.

Well, the fact its routing by Sweden in itself is unusual. Try opening the ticket anyway, explain that its not usable at peak times or something.

It's not routing through Sweden, Telia have routing boxes in telehouse in London (I used to work for The London Internet Exchange which handles loads of internet companies peering - basically they join all the ISPs together). You can tell by the ldn at the start.

All those boxes are in London. I think the main problem is the second hop where you're getting the request timed out thing, all the other times look pretty normal response time wise. hops 9 and 10 in the first screenie are a bit slow but they settled down in the second one...

But yeah I'd contact your ISP, tell them all your issues and try get them to work it out

Good point slushy, I should have spotted that.

Odd that Eircom peer with Telia, I guess they offered the best deal!

The 2nd hop timing out isn't really introducing delay, the problem was definitely at hop 9 where the delay jumps up by over 100ms. Notice that on the 2nd trace that the timeout also appears. It's likely cause is a security policy with the ISP.

No doubt that the issue was affecting a lot of people, not just Alan. Hopefully Level 3 have fixed it now.

Yeah, most ISPs etc try to peer with as many people as possible to improve their service...some companies are complete peering whores lol.

Jesus not Eircom. They screwed up when putting in my broadband and now I cant be on the internet when someone is on the phone.

lol, that also happened to my best mate a few years earlier. When he was dominating me in WC3 (hes more the RTS type, im more the FPS guy), I used to call him to force-disconnect him