Network RTT
Network traffic has two important components: latency and bandwidth.
Speed performance
Network Round Trip Times
One of the factors that has the greatest impact on the performance of a web page is the RTT: the round trip time of the network.
The higher the RTT at an origin, the better the performance by using servers geographically closer to the user.
Network traffic has two important components:
What is the Latency?
“Latency” is the time lag between the sender and receiver of data, i.e. the time from when the source sends a data packet to when it is received by the destination.
Latency is composed by:
- Propagation delay: the time it takes for a message to travel from sender to receiver.
- Transmission delay: the time it takes to push all the bits of the packet into the link.
- Processing delay: the time it takes to process the packet header, check for bit-level errors and determine its destination.
- Queuing delay: the time required to process the packet.
The sum of these delays is the total latency.
What is the Bandwidth?
The bandwidth is the maximum throughput of a physical or logical communication path.
How can I check the topology and performance of my Internet provider?
Use the command traceroute like the example below:
$> traceroute google.com
traceroute to google.com (74.125.224.102), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 10.1.10.1 (10.1.10.1) 7.120 ms 8.925 ms 1.199 ms
2 96.157.100.1 (96.157.100.1) 20.894 ms 32.138 ms 28.928 ms
3 x.santaclara.xxxx.com (68.85.191.29) 9.953 ms 11.359 ms 9.686 ms
4 x.oakland.xxx.com (68.86.143.98) 24.013 ms 21.423 ms 19.594 ms
5 68.86.91.205 (68.86.91.205) 16.578 ms 71.938 ms 36.496 ms
6 x.sanjose.ca.xxx.com (68.86.85.78) 17.135 ms 17.978 ms 22.870 ms
7 x.529bryant.xxx.com (68.86.87.142) 25.568 ms 22.865 ms 23.392 ms
8 66.208.228.226 (66.208.228.226) 40.582 ms 16.058 ms 15.629 ms
9 72.14.232.136 (72.14.232.136) 20.149 ms 20.210 ms 18.020 ms
10 64.233.174.109 (64.233.174.109) 63.946 ms 18.995 ms 18.150 ms
11 x.1e100.net (74.125.224.102) 18.467 ms 17.839 ms 17.958 ms