How to find a Network Bottleneck

Ever wonder why sometimes when you connect to a web site ( either at work or at home ), that sometimes it fast and sometimes it's slow.

Your request may go through may routers and switches before it gets to it's location, and sometimes some of the network switches or routers are having problems.

This will cause the slowness. If you work on a large corporate network, you can very easily tell where your network bottlenecks are by using this simple dos command.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Windows PC with Windows XP or Vista

1. 
   Open a DOS Prompt

   Open a DOS Command Prompt BOX
   
   START >> RUN

2. 
   Open a dos command prompt window

   type in cmd and press OK

3. 
   pathping for www.yahoo.com

   type in pathping and the destination you want to test and press enter.
   
   for this example we'll use www.yahoo.com

4. 
   phase 1 of pathping

   Depending on the destination and how many connections it has to test, it can take 15 - 300 seconds to complete. This example took 250 seconds to complete. DOS will run a standard TRACEROUTE to determine the path to measure.

5. 
   mocked up path ping results

   After 250 seconds, the results will be displayed showing where the network problems are. This example was mocked up to show an extreme condition. Lost packets and percentages can vary depending on connection issues.

Tips & Warnings

• The path ping command is only available on Windows XP and above Operating Systems.
• If the ICMP protocol has been disabled behind routers, this may not report accurately.
• On local networks, you should only pathping to known destinations to help determine network latency issues.
• Will not work through firewalls blocking ICMP protocols.