Latency Issues

[Hamins]

re your ping issues

does this occur during the early morning internet and email check or is this anytime of the day?

if it doesnt matter sounds like you may have issues with hardware.

faulty cable somewhere.

interference from something with the lan cable.

does this happen no matter which pc you ping? and no matter from what pc you ping the others?

I also suggest an application like http://www.ethereal.com/ to look at the packets on your network.

Yep, the pinging issue comes up any time of the day, but only with large packets, in excess of 15000 bytes. How do I test, if the cables or any other pertaining hardware ?

Hi Chili,

Once again, thnx a ton for the response.

I'll check out Webmail. I've also found another email server caled VPOP3 that would allow me to syn the mailboxes. However, VPOP3 would cost around $350 USD.

[cluberti]

To answer your query, the default MTU for an XP box is 1500bytes. Therefore, for your 15000 byte ping, it takes 10 packets for that to be sent. Yes, you will see dropped packets and lots of latency when trying to send that much data over the wire in a ping - ping uses ICMP, and that size of a ping on most any network is just not going to work well.

If you want to find out where the latency is, try monitoring your network with a monitoring tool such as ethereal (*nix/windows) or netmon (windows). Netmon is an easier tool to use, so I'd suggest that for you - you can find it at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/PSS/Tools/NetMon/, and it's called netmon2.zip.

Just pinging around your network tells you nothing about what's going on - you need at least a network trace of your internal network to know if you have latency (or other) issues for sure. Here's a question - how good is your antivirus and spyware protection on these machines, and how good really is that firewall of yours?

[Hamins]

Hi cluberti,

Thnx for the info on PING.

Also, I'll try out the NETMON2 utility.

We've implemented Symantec Corporate AV on all the workstations, along with a Watchguard Firebox X500 firewall.