Hi Folks!

As per Michael Wilson's post, "Lag, Zone Resets, Latency, and Bad Smells", which you can read here, we are working to understand the many different causes of a "laggy" or "bad" experience in There. The causes can be anything from a bad network connection somewhere between your computer and the There servers, a bug in a There server or the There client, a server restart, excessive server load, or other yet-unknown sources. In order to improve your experience in There, we need to identify the different kinds of causes of bad experience, and address each individually.

One area that our operations team would like to work on is network connectivity.

We'll look at this area from multiple perspectives. On the back-end, We'll be monitoring connectivity to our servers from more than 10 different major network provides. This will help us proactively identify problems with connectivity between major networks. We'll share with you the information we learn from these reports when we become aware of problems between networks that may be impacting your experience in There. Notifications of this sort will be posted to ThereCare.

As much as possible, we will also work closely with members who are experiencing "Lag" to understand if it could be caused by bad network connectivity, and if so, where the problems are.

The first step in this area is to collect and understand ping and traceroute information. It's important to understand that ping and traceroute statistics can help find real problems, but can also easily be mis-leading
.

If you do not already have an understanding of "ping" and "traceroute" and how they work on networks, you may wish to read this article first,  which will give you a bit of background.

Debugging Lag: ping and_traceroute background info

If you're comfortable with those terms already, skip right ahead to this article, on how to collect and share traceroute data with us:

Debugging Lag: How To Report Network Connectivity Statistics To There

Thanks,
--jessica
There Operations