Help Interpreting traceroute output

[jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com (miah)]

The manpage clearly states that its the round trip time of the
packet..

"Three probes (change with -q flag) are sent at each ttl setting and a
line is printed showing the ttl, address of the gateway and round trip
time of each probe."

-miah

On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 12:35:12PM -0400, trlists at clayst.com wrote:
> I am troubleshooting a performance problem for a client that involves 
> installing a software package from a mirror site.  The folks who built 
> the package, and the installer, think it's our server or network that 
> is slowing things down, but we've convinced outselves it's not, and 
> we're looking at wider network throughput issues to see what that 
> shows.
> 
> In doing so I've been using traceroute on several different Linux boxes 
> and the results don't make sense to me.
> 
> Before I get into the details, let me check something basic.  In the 
> traceroute output, is the time shown the total time to the listed 
> gateway, or the time from the previous gateway to the listed gateway.  
> For example (just showing one of the three trials here), in this 
> output:
> 
>  5  oc12.Level3.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net (209.244.160.150)  204.218 ms  
>  6  p16-1-1-0.r20.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.2.36)  188.715 ms  
> 
> do I read it as calculated values of 204 ms from gateway 4 to 5 and an 
> additional 189 from gateway 5 to 6, so that the times add?  Or as raw 
> values showing that a test packet made it to gateway 5 with a TTL of 
> 204 ms and the next one made it to gateway 6 with a TTL of 189 ms 
> (presumably because things were a little faster when the second packet 
> was sent)?
> 
> The latter is the only way that makes sense to me, but several people 
> who have been around Linux a while have claimed that the times are hop 
> to hop, not cumulative?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> --
> Tom