packet loss question

Fri Jul 8 14:02:19 UTC 2016

Philip,

Quite often slow Web page loading and email transport -- termed an application-layer problem because basic transport seems unaffected -- is due to DNS problems, particularly reverse DNS for the IP addresses originating your Web queries. If you have non-existent or intermittent IN-ADDR entries for those IPs, the remote Web servers can be timing out if they have older configurations that, for example, do DNS lookups in order to log HTTP requests and block on completion, resulting in timeouts. Use "nslookup x.x.x.x" command line queries (nslookup is on Windows, Mac and UNIX/Linux) to see if you can resolve the public IP addresses your users original queries from. You can find those addresses by visiting http://whatismyip.com from a problem desktop.

A second common cause of app-specific throughput problems, particularly where email is involved, is failed MTU discovery. The standard Internet MTU is 1500 bytes, but sometimes a router misconfiguration or change in encapsulation type along the path through your ISP lowers that to, say, 1492 or 1486 bytes (MTU is in increments of 8). The result is that whenever your web or email client sends a maximum MTU packet, the packet is dropped, resulting in connection impairment. Most HTTP and Email packets are not max-MTU in size, so you get very uneven performance simulating network congestion.

You can force the MTU to a lower number at your border to test this. You typically do this at your firewall; it's a setting on the WAN interface config. Temporarily lower that value dramatically to something like 1440 and see if your problem goes away. If it does, you may need to permanently reduce MTU, so you should try other divisible-by-8 values -- 1492, 1486, 1478, etc -- until you find the largest one that works. I commonly see this when a customer switches ISPs from DSL to Cable. Cable providers are fond of stealing 8 or 16 bytes for their CMT headers in a way that breaks MTU discovery. 

A third frequent application-layer throughout debillitator is IPv6 misconfiguration. If you support IPv6 for your end users, they may be getting directed to IPv6 web or mail servers (which are generally preferred via DNS) but thwarted by IPv6 transport issues, which could be as simple as routing or MTU, or as complex as an invisible 6-over-4 NAT somewhere (such as a your upstream ISP). These problems generally require an IPv6-competent network engineer to resolve, but you can test by disabling IPv6 on your network (which also requires an IPv6-competent network engineer :)

I'm always amazed at how often these three causes are at the root of performance problems. So it's worth investigating each.

 -mel beckman

> On Jul 8, 2016, at 6:02 AM, Phillip Lynn <phillip.lynn at netwolves.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 07/07/2016 03:52 PM, Ken Chase wrote:
>> No offence, but i swear that mtr should come with a license to use it. I get more
>> questions from people accusing us of network issues with mtr in hand...
>> 
>> You shoudlnt care that there's 80% packet loss in the middle of your route, unless
>> you have actual traffic to lag-101.ear3.miami2.level3.net. I suspect you dont.
>> (If you did, you'd have mtr'd to it directly of course.)
>> 
>> As for your second trace, the sudden jump from 0% on 2nd last hop to 100% last
>> hop packetloss seems like firewalling to me. (long discussion about the
>> probabilities of getting 5 0%pl hops in a row and 100% on an unfirewalled
>> endpoint elided. TL;DR: use more packets in your test -i 0.1 -c 100 thanks).
>> 
>> If you have 0% packetloss to your target endpoint, is there an issue here?
>> What caused you to mtr?  0% pl is pretty good. You could play quake 1.0
>> through that pl and ping time. The +20ms ATL<>CHI jump in the route you'd have
>> to take up with einstein/bill nye/$deity.
>> 
>> For the 2nd trace, the 1st hop is your latency issue (plus the big jump from
>> miami<>ashburn, again the limit is c.)
>> 
>> ICMP is allowed to be dropped by intervening routers. Someone will quote an RFC
>> at us shortly.
>> 
>> Mtr without a return route is not that useful in figuring out packetloss
>> because pl requires the packet make it there and back. Pl could be anywhere on
>> the return route, which is probably not symmetrical. The internet stopped
>> being symetrical about 20+ years ago (if it ever even loosely was), so get a friend
>> to send you an mtr to your ip from the farside.
>> 
>> (I remember a project long ago, some cgi-bin (yeah that long ago) that was
>> basically a full-path forward+reverse traceroute you could hit on a selected
>> server at the provider.  Rather handy. not sure if its still a thing, or what it was
>> called.)
>> 
>> /kc
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 03:17:40PM -0400, Phillip Lynn said:
>>   >Hi all,
>>   >
>>   >  I am writing because I do not understand what is happening.  I ran mtr
>>   >against our email server and www.teco.comand below are the results.  I am
>>   >not a network engineer so I am at a loss.  I think what I am seeing is
>>   >maybe a hand off issue, between Frontier and Level3Miami2. If I am correct
>>   >then what can I do?
>>   >
>>   >  My system is running Centos 6.5 Linux.
>>   >
>>   >Thanks,
>>   >
>>   >Phillip
>>   >
>>   >
>>   >
>>   >(! 1011)-> sudo mtr -r netwolves.securence.com
>>   >HOST: xxxxx at netwolves.comLoss%   Snt   Last   Avg Best  Wrst StDev
>>   >  1. 172.24.109.1                  0.0%    10    0.6 0.6 0.6   0.7   0.0
>>   >  2. lo0-100.TAMPFL-VFTTP-322.gni  0.0%    10    3.2 2.0 1.0   4.3   1.2
>>   >  3. 172.99.44.214                 0.0%    10    4.0 4.9 2.3   6.9   1.5
>>   >  4. ae8---0.scr02.mias.fl.fronti  0.0%    10    9.3 9.1 7.5   9.8   1.0
>>   >  5. ae1---0.cbr01.mias.fl.fronti  0.0%    10    8.9   9.1   7.6 9.7 0.7
>>   >  6. lag-101.ear3.Miami2.Level3.n 80.0%    10    9.0   8.9   8.8 9.0 0.1
>>   >  7. 10ge9-14.core1.mia1.he.net    0.0%    10   14.3 13.0 7.6  18.1   4.3
>>   >  8. 10ge1-1.core1.atl1.he.net     0.0%    10   25.6  33.2 22.4  99.7  23.6
>>   >  9. 10ge10-4.core1.chi1.he.net    0.0%    10   45.6  51.8 45.5  82.7  12.5
>>   > 10. 100ge14-2.core1.msp1.he.net   0.0%    10   53.6  63.9 53.6 125.2  21.8
>>   > 11. t4-2-usi-cr02-mpls-usinterne  0.0%    10   53.2  73.1 53.2 225.6  54.0
>>   > 12. v102.usi-cr04-mtka.usinterne  0.0%    10   53.2  53.9 53.2  55.3   0.6
>>   > 13. netwolves.securence.com       0.0%    10   53.4  53.9 53.4  55.4   0.7
>>   >
>>   >(! 1014)-> sudo mtr -r www.teco.com
>>   >HOST: xxxxx at netwolves.comLoss%   Snt   Last   Avg Best  Wrst StDev
>>   >  1. 172.24.109.1                  0.0%    10    0.6 0.6 0.6   0.7   0.0
>>   >  2. lo0-100.TAMPFL-VFTTP-322.gni  0.0%    10  104.8 81.4 1.1 113.2  43.2
>>   >  3. 172.99.47.198                 0.0%    10  115.0 77.8 2.9 115.0  40.2
>>   >  4. ae7---0.scr01.mias.fl.fronti  0.0%    10  111.1 80.2 8.5 113.5  41.3
>>   >  5. ae0---0.cbr01.mias.fl.fronti  0.0%    10  105.9  82.2   7.6 115.4 33.8
>>   >  6. lag-101.ear3.Miami2.Level3.n 70.0%    10  116.1  80.2   8.5 116.1 62.0
>>   >  7. NTT-level3-80G.Miami.Level3.  0.0%    10  110.0 81.5 9.0 120.3  41.9
>>   >  8. ae-3.r20.miamfl02.us.bb.gin.  0.0%    10  119.8  84.0 10.0 119.8  38.5
>>   >  9. ae-4.r23.asbnva02.us.bb.gin. 10.0%    10  137.4 107.6 30.1 142.7  45.7
>>   > 10. ae-2.r05.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.  0.0%    10  135.0 109.9 36.6 140.0  39.1
>>   > 11. xe-0-9-0-8.r05.asbnva02.us.c  0.0%    10  147.5 125.6 49.4 165.5  41.1
>>   > 12. 24.52.112.21                  0.0%    10  158.6 124.0 49.6 161.3  41.5
>>   > 13. 24.52.112.42                  0.0%    10  151.0 127.7 52.2 159.0  41.2
>>   > 14. ???                          100.0    10    0.0 0.0 0.0   0.0   0.0
>>   >
>>   >--
>>   >Phillip Lynn
>>   >Software Engineer III
>>   >NetWolves
>>   >Phone:813-579-3214
>>   >Fax:813-882-0209
>>   >Email: phillip.lynn at netwolves.com
>>   >www.netwolves.com
>>   >
>> 
> 
> None taken,
> 
>  We are having issues with our email and loading some web pages. I used mtr to try and find if there is a possible connection issue.  I just need to understand what is happening , and be able to explain the output showing the 80% packet loss .  We are not pointing fingers, just looking to understand the issue better.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
> Phillip Lynn
> Software Engineer III
> NetWolves
> Phone:813-579-3214
> Fax:813-882-0209
> Email: phillip.lynn at netwolves.com
> www.netwolves.com
> 