Ping and tracert time confusion?

Question

Hello, please help in the confusion
if I ping hotmail.com the time shown in the output tells me the time between sending the packet from my pc to the time the replay recevied by my pc from hotmail.com lets say its around 200ms.
Now if i made tracert hotmail.com it will tell me the time taken from my pc to each hop in the path to hotmail.com, so how come if you summed all the time between hops it will be much much higher than the ping!! how come what I'm missing here

Answer 1

Ping is one round trip to one point. Tracert is multiple round trips to each point in the route, which is a longer path overall. And routing speed can vary as network traffic and dynamic routing varies, so during tracert it might at times take less time to reach a router farther down the path.



Also the return route can be different than the route out. For example if I tracert (or traceroute) to where I have a Unix shell account and run a traceroute from there back to my public IP address, the route in each direction is different (or at least the last couple of hops close to home). Incoming traffic comes from a different public router than my outgoing public gateway.

Answer 2

tracert uses ping to count the hops. ping goes "straight" to the destination.



Basically tracert will ping the destination with a "Time To Live"(TTL) of 1. This will return the first hop address, normally your default gateway. Then it will ping again with a TTL of 2 which will return the next hop address, and so on increasing the TTL by 1 each time until it reaches the destination or maximum number of hops, whichever comes first.



Think of it like this, you tell your annoying little brother "tracert gas station", he exits the house and gets to the end of the driveway then turns around, comes back and says "I'm at the end of the driveway". Then he goes out past the end of the driveway until he reaches the first corner, comes back and says "I'm at the first corner!" and so on coming back and letting you know each time he gets to a new corner.



"Ping" on the other hand would be "ping gas station" and the little brother goes out,gets to the gas station looks,at his watch, calls you on his cellphone and says "It took me 5 minutes to get to the gas station."

Answer 3

The exact time in milliseconds the hotmail servers are set to?



The time to record each hop?



Your computer was running slow while the server was running fast or the other way around?