Troubleshoot Network Problems with pathping
The pathping command is more similar to tracert than a simple ping. Just like the tracert command, pathping will give you information about all the steps along the path to the website you want to test. It does this by sending out full ping commands along the way, gathering more information. This is done over a period of time, yielding a detailed report. The extra information is good to have, but the time required is a disadvantage. It can take a few minutes. Typically, tracert is the preferred command.
The pathping command
works like a combination of
ping
and tracert.
First open a command prompt:
Opening a Command Prompt in Windows
Type pathping from the command line, like this:
where target is either a hostname or an IP address—pop3.catalog.com or 209.217.46.121, for example. You then get a two-part report: first a list of every hop along the route to the destination, and then statistics about each hop, including the number of packets lost at each hop. Pathping in general is a much better tool to diagnosis latency from a specific source to destination with a relative degree of accuracy. Note that I said Relative, this is because latency is ALWAYS relative to your location on the network.
It uses switches—for example:
pathping -n -w 1000 litecloudhosting.comThis command tells pathping not to resolve the IP addresses of routers, and to wait one second (1,000 milliseconds) for an Echo Replay message. The table below lists the most important pathping switches.
|
Switch |
What it does |
|---|---|
-n |
Does not display the hostname of each router. |
-h value |
Sets a maximum number of hops for the trace to the destination. The default is 30 hops. |
-w value |
Sets the maximum amount of time (in milliseconds) to wait for a reply. |
-p |
Sets the amount of time (in milliseconds) to wait before a new ping is issued. The default is 250. |
-q value |
Sets the number of ICMP Echo Request messages to transmit. The default is 100. |
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