How to Run a Traceroute and Ping Test for a Game Server

If a game server feels laggy, or you are deciding which location to rent in, two simple tools give you hard numbers: ping and traceroute. Both are built into your computer, both are free, and neither needs any extra software.

• Ping measures how long a message takes to reach the server and come back. That figure is your latency.
• Traceroute shows every stop along the way, so you can see where delay is being added, not just how much there is in total.

Before you start

• Close anything that uses your internet connection: downloads, streams, cloud backups, other people's video calls. Background traffic skews the results.
• Get the server's IP address or hostname without the port number. If your server address is 203.0.113.42:28045, you test 203.0.113.42. If you use a domain name for the server, use that instead.

Run a traceroute on Windows

1. Press the Windows key, type cmd and press Enter to open Command Prompt.
2. Type the command below, swapping in your own address, and press Enter:

tracert 203.0.113.42

1. Wait. It can take a minute or more to finish.

If the output is too long to copy from the window, send it to a text file instead:

tracert 203.0.113.42 > C:\trace1.txt

Open trace1.txt from the root of your C: drive and copy the contents from there.

Run a traceroute on Mac or Linux

Open Terminal (on a Mac it is in Applications, then Utilities) and run:

traceroute 203.0.113.42

Run a ping test

To measure latency on its own, ping the server. On Windows this sends four messages and stops:

ping 203.0.113.42

On Mac and Linux, ping keeps going until you press Ctrl+C, so limit it to ten:

ping -c 10 203.0.113.42

Look at the average time. As a rough guide, under 50 ms feels excellent in most games, 50 to 100 ms is comfortable for most, and well over 100 ms is noticeable in fast-paced games. Also check for lost replies: even a small amount of packet loss on a ping test is worth investigating.

How to read a traceroute

Each line is a hop: one router or server on the path between you and the destination.

Two things look alarming but usually are not:

• An asterisk (*) or "Request timed out" means that hop did not answer. Many routers are set to ignore these requests on purpose, so this does not by itself mean packets are being lost.
• A hop with no hostname, only an IP address, is very common.

The real signal is a jump that stays high. If the times climb steadily, that is normal: each hop is further away. If they suddenly leap, for example from 20 ms to 140 ms, and stay high on every hop after it, the delay is being added at that point on the route. If the jump happens well before the final hop, the problem is on the path between you and the server, not on the server itself.

A single slow hop in the middle that goes back to normal afterwards is almost always a router that is just slow to answer these requests, and can be ignored.

Use it to choose the best server location

When you are picking where to rent a server, distance to your players matters more than almost anything else on a spec sheet.

• Ask providers for a test IP or hostname for each location. Many publish one.
• Ping each candidate location from where you and your players actually play, at the time you usually play.
• If your players are spread across the world, no location will be perfect for everyone. Choose the one that suits the majority, and accept that a few players will have a higher ping.

Sending results to support

If you contact your host's support about lag, include:

• The complete traceroute, every line, not just the last few.
• The server address you tested and roughly what time you ran the test.
• Whether other players are also lagging, and when the lag started.

That gives them what they need to tell whether the fault is on your connection, somewhere along the route, or on the server. For everything else that can cause lag, see How to Diagnose and Fix Game Server Lag.