CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsnetwork-programmingtraceroute
JonStonecash
JonStonecash

Reputation: 1402

What do the numbers reported by the Windows TraceRt Mean

I need to create a trace route as part of a .NET appliation to support trouble shooting. I have figured out how to use the .NET Ping class to do the tracing. What I do not understand is what the numbers reported by the command line utility are. This is somewhat censored results of a "tracert yahoo.com" from the Windows command line:

Tracing route to yahoo.com [206.190.60.37] over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  xx.xx.xx.xx
  2     7 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  yy.yy.yy.yy  
  3    42 ms    37 ms    41 ms  zz.zz.zz.zz  
  4    38 ms    37 ms    37 ms  aa.aa.aa.aa  
  5    36 ms    36 ms    36 ms  bb.bb.bb.bb
  6    42 ms    41 ms    41 ms  cc.cc.cc.cc  
 --- more lines deleted ---

The first column is the index and the next three columns are times in milliseconds. I have searched the web for an explanation and have come up dry. I thought that they might be min, average, and max numbers but line 2 would seem to counter that idea.

Jon Stonecash

Upvotes: 20

Views: 47103

Answers (5)

kpratama
kpratama

Reputation: 133

Basically, tracert send 3 packets to each hop. The second, third and fourth column is RTT short for Round Trip Time which means the time for the packet to reach hop and get back.

http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/run-traceroute-command/

Upvotes: 6

Marc Juchli
Marc Juchli

Reputation: 2278

Here is also a quick explanation of the results of traceroute:

http://www.ehow.com/way_5148131_understanding-traceroute-results.html

Upvotes: 0

Bill
Bill

Reputation: 34802

Tracert sends sets of pings to the destination. The first set has a time-to-live (TTL) of one. The TTL setting of one causes the first router to send an error message back to your computer. Your computer performs a DNS lookup of the IP address, and then displays the router's host name. The program then increments the TTL and sends another set of pings to retrieve the next router's information. This process is repeated until the end point is reached.

The first column is the number of hops to the destination (maximum of 30). The next three columns are the amounts of time to receive the responses. The right-most column shows the router information along the path.

Upvotes: 15

rlb.usa
rlb.usa

Reputation: 15043

I looked at Wikipedia for this one - three packets are sent, the milliseconds reported are for each packet.

Upvotes: 23

Rob Prouse
Rob Prouse

Reputation: 22647

If I remember right, tracert does three pings (actually not pings to the device, but effectively the same) to each device along the route and the the three times are just three different ping times to each device. For example, if you find a device in the list with one or more timeouts, that device is probably overloaded and causing the problems.

Upvotes: 5

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