Re: Traceroute versus other performance measurement

[Ping Pan <pingpan () cs columbia edu>]

Have you tried pathchar? It's pretty much the same as traceroute, but it
is to estimate e2e bandwidth. When it first came out, I tried it. It
didn't give good results. I heard it had been enhanced since. Go to
ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/pathchar/

- Ping

On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Paul Bradford wrote:

> I have been reading NANOG posts for probably 2 years now.. this is my 1st post.
>
> I need help with a reality/sanity check.   Traceroute is a good tool for
> checking for routing type problems (loops).  Does anyone feel it's a good tool
> to use for testing "bandwidth"....  My obvious answer is it isn't a good tool
> for that....  One problem I see is that the way traceroute works, if a
> transport mixes media between say Ethernet to LANE and back to Ethernet you
> give room for Destination unreachable responses from a trace route because you
> have to to packet switching medias with a fast cell switched media in
> between.... packets less than 64k (like traceroute info) are easily lost in the
> conversion from ethernet to LANE.
>
> Does this sound right?
> Thanks,
> Paul A. Bradford