I have just joined a new clan and i have been playing on their servers for a few months now and just recently i have been having really really bad lag spikes out of nowhere. I downloaded your program to see what the problem is and it comes to find out that there is one hop far down the line that every 10 mins or so will have a horrid time period of 10 seconds of complete packet loss. This same hop is on the way to my clans ventrilo server as well (voice program) I cannot play under these conditions and hope that it is temporary.

Since this hop is not the destination hop is there anyway that i could maybe manually tell my computer to avoid that hop and find a new one or anything else that could help me stop using that laggy hop?

Hello.

If those same packet loss periods show up at the final destination, then this is definitely something you need to worry about. If it's only an intermediate hop that's showing the packet loss and all other downstream hops don't show any packet loss, then it's pretty likely that the packet loss at the intermediate hop isn't causing your lag problems. You always have to look at the final destination first, then look back at other hops that show similar symptoms - if the final destination isn't showing a problem, then any oddities you see at any earlier hops are just "oddities" with the way the traffic and the hop are interacting - it's sending data downstream just fine. We have an analogy for this in our VoIP troubleshooting guide (http://www.pingplotter.com/tutorial/VoipTroubleshooting.html)

In any case ... there's not much you can do to route around a hop you don't like. One thing is to change ISP - they *might* use a different route to get to that target, but you won't know for sure till you try it. Another way is to talk to the host at the other end and see if the can change their BGP tables or routing priorities to favor a different network (if a different network exists that they are peering with). In many cases, there's not much you can do if it's an intermediate hop. The closer you get to an end (either your end or the server end), the more likely it is that you'll be able to affect that by talking to your ISP, or by talking to the provider at the other end.

Unfortunately, none of this is easy.

Have you correlated the packet loss at the intermediate hop with your problems? Does your period of lagginess match the packet loss periods?