Warshaw

Reading a traceroute

2026-10-16

Traceroute shows each hop on the way to a destination and how long it took to answer. The tempting mistake is to blame the first hop that shows a high number.

Routers often answer these probes slowly on purpose, because replying is low priority work. A hop with high latency matters only if every hop after it is also slow. Otherwise it is just a busy router being honest about its priorities.