Trace an Internet bottleneck

Question

Access to my site is very slow. However, if I use an online tool that tests webpage performance, the performance is normal. This leads me to believe that somewhere between my computer and my server, something on the Internet is slowing things down.

I tried googling for "trace internet bottleneck" but haven't found anything to help. Is there an online tool that will trace the response being returned and indicate the duration of time it took at the various locations where it was sent on its way from my server to my local machine to see which location is slowing things down? It should indicate an IP address so that I can contact the organization where the problem is occurring.

I've tried tracert but the times come in in milliseconds and don't show any problems. But that is at the IP level. If I access a 550kb text file, it takes around 30 seconds. So the problem can't be at the IP level but something at a higher protocol level.

My firewall is shutoff and I don't have anything locally that should slow access to the server. All other sites work fine.

Solution

On Windows, use pathping. Pathping combines traceroute and ping. It does a traceroute to the IP/Server and then pings each hop on the way.

From a command prompt type the follwing. Replace myserver.com with your hostname or IP.

pathping myserver.com

Note: This can take several minutes to run.

If latency is the issue, you will see high response times on one of the hops.

Comments

[Mostafa Hamed]

Have you performed cross validation across multiple geographic location in the same maner the issue was identified? Testing across tier 1 is redundant testing also this is off-topic for superuser

[AndroidDev]

I used webpagetest.org to test the site and it shows that the performance is normal.

[Thalys]

if pings are ok, we can rule out latency to an extent - is this on shared hosting or your own?

[AndroidDev]

I'm not seeing any problem with either traceroute or ping. This means that the problem is at a higher protocol level. It doesn't matter whether its html or plain text. Is there a way to trace packets at a higher protocol level? It's almost like some server has a firewall gone wacky and testing everything going through it.