Whats Traceroute?
Traceroute is a diagnostic tool that lists every machine your data is routed though from your computer to another system over the net. GameSpy simply uses this function to count the number of machines (i.e. HOPS) there are from your computer to the Quake server. This will give you an idea on how close the server is to you on the Internet. Average is under 15 hops. • What is a ping? It’s a measurement, in milliseconds (ms – 1/1000th of a second), of how long it takes a packet of data to get from your computer to the server and back again (think of a submarine sonar ping.) This is a measurement of latency. The lower the ping time, the better the connection. Game play with low ping times will be much smoother. Technical details: In reality, GameSpy doesn’t “ping” a Quake server. A ping issues an ICMP packet to the destination node. The destination node’s IP stack (daemon) will respond to you. The ping measures whether the path is reliable (i.e. timeouts) and how far away the node is from
