What should your ISP be able to do about a bad traceroute?

I

Iowabucks

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 22, 2008
Messages
186
Hey everyone,

I have noticed a couple websites that just don't load for me the last couple weeks. I have run a traceroute on both and after about the 14th hop the request times out.

I emailed my ISP about it because I have heard they can sometimes alter the route bypassing the slow server. All I got back was an email saying that "the issue is outside of our network and we wouldn't be able to troubleshoot." Pretty much saying sorry, nothing we can do.

What should any good ISP be able to do to help a subscriber in this situation?

Also, is there any better software out there to help me figure out exactly where this bad server is?

Thx. Jerry.
 
It sounds like they tried to help you as much as they can. They can't control what other networks do. Typically your ISP's network does not go around the world and they rely on other companies' networks to move data. If you figure out what that network is, where the problems are, you may be able to contact that company and ask them to take a look. But there might not be any network problems, as it's normal for pings to time out when doing traceroutes and that alone isn't an indicator of a problem. It's also possible there is a problem at the actual website you are trying to connect to or on their servers/network. What are the sites in question? Have you considered contacting them directly?
 
nothing really, it is not their network, sometimes ISP's dont have other routes or it would take alot to get a new route for you, if even possible.

i think it is like the first 2-5 hops are / can be our ISP, after that it is someone else's problem.

a tracert route showing * can simply mean their hardware does not reply to ICMP requests, simple as that, and this day in age with DDoS running rampant alot of places drop ICMP packets.

You should be contacting the website owners.
 
timta2 said:
What are the sites in question? Have you considered contacting them directly?
Click to expand...


Walmart.com and Paperlesspay.com.

Both of these sites take 2 to 5 minutes to load right now. Walmart.com was good a couple months back but for the last couple weeks anyway I try but give up on it after a minute or two.

Usually its about the 14th hop. then all the rest time out also, up to about 30 hops.

 
I don't know why it should matter for number of hops, but have you tried using a different DNS table? Maybe openDNS? ISP DNS's aren't always trustworthy.
 
Try using Firefox! IE11 really sucks for quite a few websites. I have had IE11 time out multiple times on many given web sites, so I switch to Firefox and pages will open instantly!
 
Seeing timeouts like that is actually normal. Some servers will not respond to traceroute or ping if they are setup that way.

The recommendation of trying different dns servers would also be my recommendation. Open DNS or google dns which is 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
 
How is using different DNS servers going to help?

DNS is DNS and should be identical across the internet (except while servers are replicating changes). If you're getting an IP address from a name, you should get the same IP address from the other DNS server. The only way a different DNS server is going to help is if you're getting a wrong IP address, which you clearly aren't.

Changing a DNS server isn't going to change the routes the packet travels over the internet...
 
I agree - different DNS servers won't make a difference. This is a valid solution IF the DNS servers you have listed are having problems. Given that you were able to resolve not only the website addresses, but all the intermediate router IP addresses, looks like DNS is working just fine to me.

Furthermore, traceroute is generally a terrible tool because it is easily misunderstood:
1) It only shows the path taken in one direction. The direction data takes from the website to you is quite different. Network paths are rarely symmetrical. The problem you're having could very well be due to a problem on the ingress path and traceroute can not indicate that.

2) Mid-hop RTTs (Round Trip Time) are misleading and high RTT values very rarely indicate an actual problem. Routers are highly efficient in passing traffic through them. Traffic destined TO them (like those ping packets) has a much lower priority for processing since that is not their main job and this will be reflected in the RTT time. This is proven when you have mid-router RTT times which is greater than the ultimate RTT time to the destination, unless of course you believe in time travel. :)

The correct tool to use is ping to determine latency and packet loss. Of course as you found out, the destination doesn't allow pings all the way to their website.

Also, your ISP (and the others above me) are correct. There is very little that your provider can do to resolve latency issues on networks outside of their control. They are sometimes able to reroute in the event of an upstream provider outage, but this takes more than what a home internet connection helpdesk person can do and is usually automatically executed.

What I ultimately suspect as the problem is something much more closer to home.

The advice to try another web browser, have you taken that?
If you don't have another one installed, you probably should. But quickly, let's eliminate all problems with IE11. From your Run/Search window, type in "Internet Explorer". You will see a program listed "Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)". Select this. Try your websites again.

If they are quicker, then the problem is with an add-on installed on the Browser. Close the No Add-ons browser and open up the regular browser. Click on the gear in the top-right hand corner and select Manage Add-ons. Go through here and start disabling and testing until it the slowness goes away.
 
Crystal Gaol said:
The advice to try another web browser, have you taken that?
If you don't have another one installed, you probably should. But quickly, let's eliminate all problems with IE11. From your Run/Search window, type in "Internet Explorer". You will see a program listed "Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)". Select this. Try your websites again.

If they are quicker, then the problem is with an add-on installed on the Browser. Close the No Add-ons browser and open up the regular browser. Click on the gear in the top-right hand corner and select Manage Add-ons. Go through here and start disabling and testing until it the slowness goes away.
Click to expand...

Going to those sites with Google Chrome works, but is still slow. IE with no ad ons is slightly faster but still slow (site loads faster but hangs). Disabling ad ons one at a time doesn't make it any better.
 
Slow, as in minutes slow or seconds slow with Chrome or IE with Add-ons disabled?
Before you described it as basically not workable.
 
Walmarts site will load the homepage fast but take about 15 seconds before I can enter any letters in the search. Once I search it just sits there trying to load the next page which never happens. Any other activity I try on the website will show me the "walmart.com is not responding" box.

The paperless pay site used to take about 10 seconds to get to the third page I went to. Now it takes about 1 minute to get there. No quicker without the ad-ons.

Chrome will get me on the paperless pay site quicker, but walmart site says "site unresponsive" too after the 2nd page it loads.
 
Are all other websites performing OK, just not these two?

In Internet Explorer, open up InPrivate mode (CTRL-SHIFT-P) or Incognito Mode in Chrome (CTRL-SHIFT-N) and browse to these two websites.

If they respond normally, then you need to clear your caches on both browsers and then test again with the normal browser mode.

Have you tried performing a speedtest? www.speedtest.net or www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
 
Crystal Gaol said:
Are all other websites performing OK, just not these two?
Click to expand...
Just these two as far as I know right now.

Crystal Gaol said:
In Internet Explorer, open up InPrivate mode (CTRL-SHIFT-P) or Incognito Mode in Chrome (CTRL-SHIFT-N) and browse to these two websites.

If they respond normally, then you need to clear your caches on both browsers and then test again with the normal browser mode.
Click to expand...
Same exact results.

Crystal Gaol said:
Have you tried performing a speedtest? www.speedtest.net or www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Click to expand...
I use speedtest.net fairly frequently. Shows 10Mb speeds like they should be. Although my upload speeds are about .20Mb, but that's another problem I need to work on. Other wireless devices have normal upload speeds.
 
If speedtests are good and other websites are good, then perhaps there is something going on with the websites that you're going to.

Do you do any type of firewall filtering or configured the browser to disallow third-party cookies or tracking?

If it is just these two websites (that you've discovered) then likely they are using some scripting (not denied by disabling add-ons) which are being processed slowly by your computer or received slowly by your computer.

There is a developer mode in IE (also other browsers) that can be enabled by pressing F12. Go to the network section, then Start Capture. Go to walmart.com and wait until the page is loaded, then stop the capture.

You can tell by the bar graphs how long something took to be requested, received and then rendered. But this probably won't do squat for you.
 
No firewall filtering or disallowing third party cookies. But I think I will disallow third party cookies after reading up on it.

In developer mode I can see everything you mentioned. I can even give you a screenshot if you like. But there were a lot of long bars.
 
Since this is happening with multiple browsers under all sorts of different configurations, no add-ons and no cookies and only with two known websites, the problem seems to be with the websites themselves.

I can tell you that on my own personal computer, it took ~27 seconds for the walmart.com website to load in IE, according to Dev Tools. That is a pretty long time for a website. I can also tell you that it required around 21 billion cycles on my processor, downloaded nearly 4MB of data and uploaded another 1.8MB of data (well, IE did - can't be sure if it was the website or the application).
 
I'm surprised you had to upload that much data. I wonder if my slow .20 Mbps upload speed is making the site so slow for me?

I ran a program I found call Netalizer that told me I had a very high buffer time that could affect uploads. Not sure of the exact wording, I'm at work right now.

Maybe if I can get to the root of my slow upload speed, it may fix the slow websites too.
 
The data transferred was based on Sysinternal's Process Explorer's network counters for the program.
 
I had this issue, I called the ISP and they blamed my equipment. We scheduled someone to come out and 10 minutes later it was fine.
 
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