Hi all,

I've got a strange ip packet speed problem. It boils down to something wrong
with some provider, but there is one aspect to it I don't understand and
maybe someone more informed about TCP/IP could explain.

I try to ping www.magnet.ie from two different sources: Once from my local
computer, where I go online via Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) DSL, and then from a
hosted Amazon EC2 instance. When I ping from Amazon, I get a time of 86ms,
which seems fine, from my local machine via DTAG I get around 500ms, which
is very slow. Normally my DTAG line is very fast.

The weird thing is that if I look at tracert output from both, they seem to
use the same route from some point on, i.e. they seem to both eventually go
via tiscali. At nodes that they already both use I still get good timings,
only later do the times for tracert from DTAG get bad. How can this be? I
would understand that if they both used very different access routes that I
can get different times, but why would traffic that is already in the
tiscali net then get different run times? Or am I misunderstanding something
basic about IP here?

Here is my tracert results from the Amazon EC2 computer:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms dom0-10-248-68-174.compute-1.internal
[10.248.68.174]
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.248.68.2
3 66 ms 200 ms 175 ms ec2-75-101-160-164.compute-1.amazonaws.com
[75.101.160.164]
4 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms
othr-216-182-232-9.usma2.compute.amazonaws.com [216.182.232.9]
5 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms
othr-216-182-232-15.usma2.compute.amazonaws.com [216.182.232.15]
6 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 72.21.197.205
7 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms
othr-216-182-232-146.usma2.compute.amazonaws.com [216.182.232.146]
8 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms xe-0-3-0-0.was12.ip.tiscali.net
[77.67.68.153]
9 85 ms 88 ms 85 ms so-0-0-0.dub20.ip.tiscali.net
[213.200.80.14]
10 86 ms 88 ms 86 ms magnet-gw.ip.tiscali.net [213.200.67.166]
11 86 ms 88 ms 86 ms 85.91.2.72
12 86 ms 88 ms 86 ms d-clon-core1a.magnet.ie [85.91.3.26]
13 86 ms 88 ms 86 ms 85-91-6-42.magnet.ie [85.91.6.42]

and here from my DTAG computer:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms speedport.ip [192.168.2.1]
2 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms 217.0.118.33
3 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms 87.186.240.70
4 11 ms 23 ms 11 ms f-ea5.F.DE.net.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.165]
5 12 ms 12 ms 11 ms so-3-2-2.fra10.ip.tiscali.net
[213.200.64.105]
6 37 ms 39 ms 39 ms so-1-0-0.dub20.ip.tiscali.net [89.149.187.2]
7 37 ms 36 ms 36 ms magnet-gw.ip.tiscali.net [213.200.67.166]
8 37 ms 36 ms 36 ms 85.91.2.72
9 482 ms 481 ms 480 ms d-clon-core1a.magnet.ie [85.91.3.26]
10 482 ms 483 ms 482 ms 85-91-6-42.magnet.ie [85.91.6.42]

They both seem to route via 213.200.67.166 and then 85.91.2.72, and for
those two nodes I still get very good times for both cases, only later do
the converge...

Thanks a lot for any insight!

Best,
David