 koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:14 | reply to yyonline
Re: Intermittent Speed/Latency/Connectivity issues said by yyonline:Second, regarding the smokeping tests... I'm in PA, so the NY test rarely shows any loss. The CA test shows some occasional packet loss. Does anybody know if a small amount of packet loss is normal or acceptable with the smokeping tests? Whatever that tool is (smokeping), it's horrendous. The graphs tell me very little, and are nearly impossible to read (I love all the blurring, and it isn't image compression since you're using PNG). I don't know how you put up with that.
To answer your question: "it depends". I don't know how smokeping works, so I don't know if it's similar in methodology to that of WinMTR, mtr, or traceroute.
If the tool attempts to send a packet (of any type; TCP, UDP, or ICMP) to a router at each hop between you and the destination, then yes, some of those hops are very likely to show packet loss due to ICMP de-prioritisation. This does not mean the packet you sent the destination is being dropped or de-prioritised -- only the individual hops (to routers) along the way. This is completely normal in this day and age, which is sad, because it makes troubleshooting a pain in the rear; I cannot tell you how many times I've had to argue with peering providers when they try to use the ICMP de-prio excuse at incorrect/inappropriate times.
If smokeping simply sends an ICMP packet to the destination (e.g. does not operate like WinMTR, mtr, or traceroute), and you're seeing packet loss there, then that also "could" be normal -- some IP stacks of servers will discard excessive numbers of ICMP packets if received, others can be configured to drop a certain percentage of traffic of any type (ICMP is common).
Honestly, it would be much more beneficial if you could use a tool like PingPlotter (which requires some configuration changes to be effective) or WinMTR and see if there's an increase in packet loss at a specific hop that "trickles down" through further hops.
Miscellaneous:
Your modem signal levels look okay, except for your upstream power, which is a little on the high side.
"Started Unicast Maintenance Ranging - No Response received - T3 time-out" messages that recur are normal. Most of us see this sort of thing regularly. If you see FEC framing loss, or "broadcast maintenance" messages, those will indicate loss of frame (cable sync loss).
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