On 17/09/2013, at 4:45 PM, Jonathan Brewer
Keep in mind:
1.) As Ben mentioned, 8.8.8.8 appears a great number of places on the Internet; your path is unlikely to be the same as Matthew's 2.) Do not assume that Vodafone's network has anything to do with TelstraClear's network.
Otherwise an interesting thread. The tin-foil-hat wearer in me says to always be suspicious of sudden increases in latency over known paths. Port mirroring doesn't add latency, but if you have to re-route traffic to a box with a spare port to keep the TLAs happy...
I was thinking of replying to this and subtly implying that that's exactly what it was, to see who bit. Isn't it an FLA these days, though? :-) Not sure how you'd get that much latency though - maybe round trip to Waihopai, twice or maybe even thrice (to catch any packets they missed the first time)? Oh or a single round trip to Pine Gap or something? Anyway, reality is large networks do changes that are sometimes in several stages over a number of days, and sometimes result in less than optimal routing for a period of time, often for a sub-set of the network. Given the networks in question, you'd expect that there's some of these sorts of changes going on, related to improving on Jon's point no. 2 above. Pretty sure what you're seeing is Google learning the route for the network you're in over a link in the US. Certainly your outbound path is going that way - the latency step of about 130ms before leaving the network is enough evidence of that without me even needing to check routing tables. Ignore the reverse DNS bits. Check the same latency again tomorrow, would be my informed guess. :-) As always, if you have performance impacting or functionality problems you'll want to call your ISP's support guys so they know and can pass on any customer impacting issues. Sounds like things are working OK though, yeah? As has been mentioned by others, don't use 8.8.8.8 for DNS if you're in NZ because Akamai will make your life hard. Using these sort of things for latency or connectivity measurements is probably OK, but just like spam filtering, use them all together to avoid false positives. -- Nathan Ward