I'm trying to troubleshoot an intermittent data throughput problem. It seems that my broadband connection (that can show 10 Mbps) will often be very slow to respond and will periodically stall during downloads. I have not been able to see any specific repeatable problems. This has been true with several hardware changes.

The system is a little complex, with a motorola Cable modem connected to a trendnet router/firewall (that is not the DHCP server or gateway) that I have replaced with no effect and then a Linux X86 DHCP server/gateway for the system. I have bypassed the Linux box, tested from the Linux box and swapped the router/firewall for two others and the problem remained unchanged.

The logs on the Cable modem show no problems.

When I run Pingplotter from inside the network I get one hop to every location I try. I don't see the intermittent on Pingplotter but I do see lost pings when I ping Yahoo or Google from several machines in the system. If i go directly to the router with a fixed IP I see all of the steps but still no clues as to the intermittent that is still there.

How can I troubleshoot this and which version of Pingplotter will allow me to see the problem? And why does the Linux box hide the hops? Can I change that? Do I want to?