In computer news this week, 04/16/2002

Measuring the performance of your ISP

Lots of things can slow you down on the internet; modem problems, slow websites, and sometimes your ISP is slow. How can you determine the performance of your ISP? This might be just a minor irritant to the average internet surfer, but if your an internet bond trader relying on your program to update - it can cost you money - and if you're a game player - it can really ruin the fun.

A couple weeks ago I talked about a couple of built-in Windows utilities named ping and tracert, which can test the response times of web sites. Unfortunately there's no documentation on how to use these utilities and interpret their results, which can be frustrating.

So frustrating that one guy wrote his own program to test his ISP's response and interpret the results and graph them, and now this program - pingplotter - is available to anyone interested in trying it out and seeing how their ISP and other websites are doing.

In internet terms, a ping packet is an IP packet requesting that a copy of its contents be echoed back to the sender - you. The time it takes for the packet to get to the site, and then return to you, is the ping time, or latency. In general, the lower this is, the better your connection.

It will be surprising to anyone who uses this program to see how many intermediaries there are between your computer and the website you're testing. You have this idea that it's your modem, then your phone line, then straight onto the internet directly to your isp.

But pingplotter will show you all the hops and relays in between until you get to where you want to go, as well as packet loss percentage, the numeric dns address of the site, and the response times, neatly graphed into green, yellow and red. You can save a log of any site you test, but even better than that, you can set up alerts to monitor the conditions of a specific site, and have the program audibly inform you of bad conditions or even email you.

Pingplotter will show you where problem slowdowns lie, in which of the hops or domains it finds them in, and help you interpret the results.

On kpbx.org there's 13 hops tonight, whereas for npr.org there's 19. The KPBX site is responding well, but the NPR site has a lot of red showing. Neither site shows any packet loss or major problems.

When using pingplotter to trace the performance of your ISP it's important to remember you have to do a lot of testing over a period of time. The program can be set to test over any period of time and to save the results, and even notify you. It can run in the background while you use your computer or surf the internet.

Probably the best features of pingplotter are is ease of use - everything is just there waiting for you to use it - and its excellent documentation manual that explains the program completely and also gives you a wealth of information about the internet, isp's, and protocols and communications in general.

So if you're having any internet problems, you can find pingplotter at http://www.pingplotter.com/. The cost of the program - marketed as trial shareware - is very reasonable - just $ 15.00 a copy.

But the software manufacturer of pingplotter - Nessoft - located in our neighboring state in Boise, Idaho - is going to donate several copies of it for our upcoming pledge drive, so keep listening to KPBX for further details during the drive.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230