When you're calling your ISP's tech support, having these kinds of graphs to email them carries a heck of a lot more weight than generic complaints about "slowness". But they're simple to use and easy to gather data with. They're no match for fancy, dedicated networking diagnostic apps. Some hops may show 100 packet loss, this is because not everything responds to a ping request so it will report as 100, skip it, and move on to. You will see your router/modem as Hop 1, the destination IP as the last hop, and every point in-between. Now, these are intentionally lightweight tools. Enter an IP address or even a web address for basic testing, hit 'Play' and watch the results. Set the graph interval to something wide like 24 or 48 hours, and once you collect enough samples, you'll have a nice idea of when your ISP's network is busy or unavailable: To test for latency or connectivity problems you'll want to run a few instances of PingPlotter over a series of days, all pinging large websites. Click the + at the top left of the program to create a new trace. Also ensure Focus is set to All and Interval is set to 2.5 seconds. Right-click on the top bar, over Avg, Min, Cur, and check Maximum Latency. It comes in a few editions, including free. In the Target Name or IP field, enter the IP address of the recommended data center. ![]() But it can be frustrating if your connection isn't responsive or is unreliable.įor latency measurements, I like PingPlotter. How quickly does your ISP get your packets from point A to point B? Do they arrive in a timely fashion? Do they arrive at all? Unless your connection suffers from severe packet loss, this is a bit less of a priority than raw bandwidth. For such a lightweight little applet, it also has some surprisingly sophisticated long-term logging and reporting abilities- you can see how much bandwidth you've used over weeks and even months. It only shows traffic on a single computer, but when run on a server it can give you a nice idea of how much bandwidth you're using at any given time. Your typical cable modem is around 300 kilobytes per second when downloading (sometimes even faster), but only 30 kilobytes per second when uploading.įor quick bandwidth measurements, I like NetMeter. How many kilobytes per second does your ISP allow you to transmit and receive? Most consumer internet connections are highly asymmetric- they offer extremely fast downloads but only a tiny fraction of that for uploads. The two most important questions to ask are: But I did make good use of two of my favorite tools for quick and dirty internet connection troubleshooting. There wasn't much I could do about the traffic spike. ![]() So I had a few bandwidth issues recently, which you can see in the six-month alexa traffic graph for this domain. Quick and Dirty Internet Connection Troubleshooting
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