Solving Latency Problems: What Are MTRs?
When trouble strikes and your server needs a little push, MTRs can help you diagnose your problems.
If you notice that your server is acting up, increased latency or getting caught up somewhere, an MRT (or ‘My Traceroute’ or ‘Matt’s Traceroute’) can help you track the pathway of your requests while also tracking any lost packets along the way.
If you have ever called into our support center for help with a slow response time, you may already be familiar with an MTR as they are often requested by our technical support staff to help you diagnose any issues you may be having. The great aspect of traceroutes is that you don’t need any technical experience to perform a traceroute on the path that your requests are taking. But first let’s discuss the basics…
What is an MTR?
An MTR is a tool that mixes a traceroute combined with a ping. Employing an MTR is like hiring a spy to follow your signal around the internet as it travels to different stops (called hops) along the way. When it gets back to you, you will be able to see exactly how long your signal took to get from one point to another. If your signal is taking an unusually long amount of time (called latency) it will be displayed in the results.
This information will allow you to see where your traffic is getting hung up, the path that your traffic is taking to and from your location, as well as if you are losing any packets of information along the way.
How do I perform an MTR?
There are different methods for MTRs depending on the system you are currently using. For the sake of this post, we will assume that you are employing a Windows system. If you are operating from a Mac or Linux desktop you can refer to this knowledgebase article for further instructions.
If you are using a Windows system, you may utilize a program called WinMTR to obtain MTR data. Outlined in the steps below are instructions on how to install and obtain MTR information using WinMTR. You will need to submit the information retrieved to a ticket for our support staff to review. You can do this from within your CHI account.
Follow the instructions below on your PC (or the PC experiencing connectivity issues to/from the server).
- In your browser, navigate to http://winmtr.net/download-winmtr/ and select the download link next to the corresponding bit version of your program.
- Follow the directions to download the WinMTR .zip file.
- In Windows Explorer, right click the WinMTR .zip file and select “Extract All…” to extract the entire application file.
- Double click to launch the WinMTR program.
- In the “Host:” field:
- If running from your PC, enter the hostname or IP address of your Windows server and click Start. Let the MTR run until 100 appears in both the Sent and Recv columns.
Note: you can obtain your local IP address by performing a Google search for “IP”, or by visiting a site such as http://whatismyip.org/.
- If running from your Windows Server, enter the IP address of your PC.
Let the MTR run until 100 appears in both the Sent and Recv columns then click Stop. - Select Copy HTML to clipboard to copy the and press Ctrl+V to paste the results into the support ticket that you have created.
Once you have submitted the MTR information to our support staff, they will be able to look it over and provide you with suggestions to solve your latency issues.
If any of these steps are confusing, or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact our support team at Midphase.com.