Can you help me understand this traceroute to a game server?

[Jordi838]

Hello,

I am having ping issues with a game server. I'm having a stable ping of 300ms, but It's just too high to play the game normally.
If i'm correct, this is the server's IP: 154.45.216.106 (see the image).

First I did a speedtest to see if my connection to a nearby server is allright. The answer was yes: The ping to a nearby server was 11ms.

After a server lookup it looks like some IP-locators say that the server is in the US, other locators say that the server is in Paris, France. (France makes sense, because the developers are from France).

My traceroute to the game server looks like this: http://pastebin.com/4dEVN4tm (I have hidden the first 4 steps to protect my IP-adress)

When you look at the route, it seems like it goes from the Netherlands (Amsterdam?) to the US (Washington?) and back to the Netherlands. It looks like the most latency is also coming from these steps.
As you can see, at step 13 the packet arrives at Paris, France. So why does it go the US first? Is the US server redirecting me back to the server in Paris? Can it not go to Paris instantly?

So my question is: Is there a way for me to improve my traceroute?

My ISP is UPC. (UPC just merged with ISP Ziggo, but the problem has been here before they merged.)

If you need any more information to help me, please let me know.

P.S. I've also played the game somewhere else where the ISP was KPN. My ping was around 60 there. I wish I had that ping here, at home. I didn't do a traceroute test on that location, but I guess KPN doesn't send me to the US first, where UPC does.

 

[bill001g]

The short answer is going to be you can't do anything.

As you suspect the traffic appears to go all the way to the USA and back to europe. This is actually pretty good latency considering that.

Why it does this is related to how the internet itself if build. ISP do not all directly connect to each other and even the ones that do only connect in certain fixed number of locations. That large 10 or so ISP are called tier 1 and they pretty much directly connect to all other tier1 ISP in multiple locations. So if you and the server you want to use are both on tier 1 ISP you will likely get a optimum path. The server you are trying to contact appears to buy services from cogent which is a tier1 provider. They likely have multiple ISP so it tends to be hard to say for sure without lots of digging.

When you use lower tier ISP you get all kinds of poor paths. Say ISP 1 and ISP 2 have no direct connection. But they both connect to ISP 3 but only in some far away country. The traffic must then go to that far away country to pass between them.

There really is no fix for this. You change ISP to a larger one or at least to one you has a direct connection to a tier 1 isp in your country. The only other option is to find a VPN service provider that can provide a private connection between the ISP. So even if ISP1 and ISP2 have no direct connection a VPN provider may have purchased a connection to each of these ISP in your country. You traffic could then go
ISP1----vpn provider---get new ip----ISP2 Finding these VPN providers is extremely hard.

There are many tools ISP provide that will give you ideas how things are connected. Looking glass sites allow you to run trace from some ISP routers. They also let you see the actual BGP router paths and you can infer the peering from some of this.

Still it likely makes no difference. Most people can't choose to use a different ISP and they can't do anything to change the peering between ISP.

 

[Jordi838]

bill001g,

Thanks for your reply, it gave me a lot of insight.
I might look into the VPN's but I'm not sure if I'll do this.

Kind regards.