Click HERE to visit our home page. In situations like this, it is often tempting to contact our own system administrators to complain. If DNS goes down, or is swamped with heavy traffic, it may not be possible to reach a particular site, unless you know the IP address. When routers are down, or overwhelmed with traffic, serious delays can result. These commands will report the delay and data loss along each section of the Internet backbone, from your site to the location you are trying to reach.
Asterisks indicate delays.
The more asterisks along the route, the longer the delay. Three asterisks generally indicate a bottleneck. While these tools are helpful in locating the source of problems, they don't correct the problems themselves. Because the Internet has developed largely in the absence of centralized control, it is more vulnerable to regional outages than other national resources, such as the interstate highway system, or telephone service. The explosive growth of the WWW in recent years has added to the congestion.