Live Demo
I began by identifying the 24 sites I frequent the most. I hoped by running a traceroute on the same site 12 times, I would begin to uncover distinct alternative routes travelled by the packets. Unfortunately, my resulting data didn’t reveal any alternative routes. I suppose that within the time period that I performed the traceroutes, the packets rarely if ever hit a router that was overwhelmed. For the vast majority, in all 12 traceroutes the packets travelled the same path to their ultimate destination. Had I continued to run automated traceroutes at regular intervals throughout a day, week, or even month — I’d expect to discover some distinct “alternate” routes.
To make use of the data I did collect, I created a minimal viz to show the number of jumps a packet of data made to finally arrive at it’s destination. See the live demo after the jump.
Traceroute Viz
Live Demo
I began by identifying the 24 sites I frequent the most. I hoped by running a traceroute on the same site 12 times, I would begin to uncover distinct alternative routes travelled by the packets. Unfortunately, my resulting data didn’t reveal any alternative routes. I suppose that within the time period that I performed the traceroutes, the packets rarely if ever hit a router that was overwhelmed. For the vast majority, in all 12 traceroutes the packets travelled the same path to their ultimate destination. Had I continued to run automated traceroutes at regular intervals throughout a day, week, or even month — I’d expect to discover some distinct “alternate” routes.
To make use of the data I did collect, I created a minimal viz to show the number of jumps a packet of data made to finally arrive at it’s destination. See the live demo after the jump.