What's the best ping & trace tool ?

[hlds_noob]

What do you think is the best trace tool to use for finding the best data center to lease a game server in ? visualtrace, pingplotter ect

The reason I ask is that it seems that 2013 is one of the worst years I have seen for routers that are simply over loaded with traffic and having way to much packet loss. I'm considering renting some new servers from NFO but having been doing a lot of research and it doesn't seem to matter who I rent with because the routers I will have to pass through from Sacramento ca to either Chicago or new york are just awful.

[kraze]

As someone who lives in California and is also on Comcast, they appear to be having a lot of issues recently. General research and knowledge leads me to indicate they're overloading many of their links in a few places causing for high latency and packet loss during peak times.

You're more then welcome to run an MTR to any of our locations and send it to us if you are seeing high latency or packet loss so we can take a look.

To answer your question, though, normally an MTR is good enough to get the needed data.

[Edge100x]

My preferred tool is definitely MTR, run from a Linux command-line.

Everyone's routing is a bit different and what's best for you might not be best for others, so also keep that in mind. You'll want to have other prospective users of the server run tests, as well.

[hlds_noob]

Comcast is horrible right now because their doing upgrades across the country. In order to get the most players at all times of the day I should have my server in an CHI or NYC data center. It's starting to look like DAL may be the best DC for my routing from Sacramento.

Thank you gent's

[hlds_noob]

I just ordered my new server in Dallas and this is what the trace showed for Comcast coming out of LA when using the trace tool from HLSW. What is going on with Comcast ?

[Edge100x]

One reason I like MTR is that it outputs easy-to-interpret text that can be copied and pasted.

It's hard to tell here, but it looks like Comcast may be performing some ICMP rate-limiting for responses generated by their routers.