Diagnosing 2% Packet Loss

fordem wrote:

2%, 3% loss over what time period? Personally, I'm against the use of a ping as a tool to diagnose anything other than a connectivity issue, I've seen far too many people, professionals included, in a futile search fro problems that they perceive exist because of the way they use the tool. Worrying about 2~3% packet loss across the internet, where you have no control, of the route the traffic takes, and no idea of what's going on along that route is nothing more an exercise in futility. Ping the inside interface of your router - if you have packet loss - that is inside your network, you can find the cause & fix it, ping the external interface of your router (be very careful here if you have a dynamic address, as it may change), if you have packet loss to the external interface that is not present to the internal interface, you may want to take a closer look at what the router is doing. One caution - note I said packet loss - you can expect to see variations in the response times, as far as the router is concerned, responding to ping requests is not a matter of urgency, and does not receive a high priority, it will reply when it can, and if you get a time out (which will be shown as packet loss) because of that, as far as the router is concerned - tough luck, try again later.

adit wrote:
Old router. How fast is your connection?

The rebooter pings once every 10 seconds to the sites/IPs I posted. It also pings our router internal lan address and reboots if it timeouts for more than 5 seconds. The fvs114 almost instantly reboots, so this works quite well.

I actually wouldn't worry about the packet loss except that it used to be zero across the board. I've also seen problems with rdp sessions dropping as well as other data transfers including a speed test. The packet loss is indicating an actual problem somewhere.

I tried the ping to internal/external IPs and everything is rock solid with zero loss. Pings to anything external seem to have issues--our other sites via site-to-site (normally zero loss), our ISPs web site (normally zero loss), and of course what the rebooter has been pinging.

Our ISP came out again to examine the tap where the cable comes from. I think they may have something going on even though it may not have shown up in the tests the tech did. I'll be there this Sunday, so hopefully I can figure it out. What's interesting is that the loss percentage has dropped quite a bit and performance is approaching normal for all communications (rdp, file xfers, speedtests, etc.):

www.google.com	74.125.225.18	40 ms	3 %
www.yahoo.com	98.138.253.109	60 ms	1 %
www.bing.com	204.79.197.200	10 ms	0 %
www.ask.com	184.26.143.137	20 ms	1 %

Yes, old router, but sat around unused for better part of a decade. Connection is 25/5 cable modem. Full speeds without any problems for the last few years in same usage patterns.