Presumably you're asking if it's a good tool to measure *available* bandwidth or lack thereof, i.e. congestion and its byproducts of packet loss and increased latency. No, it isn't! - Congestion resulting from asymmetric paths can be misinterpreted through traceroute. - Cases where ICMP performance with respect to the routers themselves is significantly lower than throughput of production traffic will often skew results. Having said that, where traceroutes suggest a POSSIBLE problem on my own network, I'd check further. However, I would never ask the operator of another network to troubleshoot solely on the basis of traceroute output.
-----Original Message----- From: Paul Bradford [mailto:paul@adelphia.net] Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 9:08 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Traceroute versus other performance measurement
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"....