Duration: 1:16

3 views

0

Here's how to Run a Traceroute on a Mac.

i. Traceroute is a utility that shows the path and the time it takes for data to travel from your device to a website or server. It can help you troubleshoot network connectivity issues by identifying where the problem occurs. However, sometimes traceroute may not work properly on a Mac, and you may encounter some issues, such as:

- Traceroute results show asterisks (***) or request timed out messages. This means that the traceroute did not receive a response from a router or server within the specified time limit. This could happen due to network congestion, firewall settings, or unreachable destinations.
- Traceroute results show negative or inconsistent times. This means that the traceroute received a response from a router or server that had a different clock or time zone than your device. This could happen due to incorrect system settings, network delays, or routing loops.
- Traceroute results show different paths or destinations. This means that the traceroute followed a different route or reached a different endpoint than expected. This could happen due to dynamic routing, load balancing, or DNS caching.

These are some of the known issues when running a traceroute on a Mac and their possible causes. To fix these issues, you can try the following solutions:

- Use a different traceroute method, such as TCP SYN or ICMP, instead of the default UDP method. You can do this by adding the -S or -I option to the traceroute command in Terminal.
- Use absolute paths, define necessary environment variables, or use the full path to the command when running traceroute in Terminal. This can avoid environment differences that may affect the traceroute results.
- Use a different browser, clear the browser cache and cookies, or use a browser extension that blocks or modifies the URLs when running traceroute through Network Utility. This can prevent guccounter=1 or other parameters from interfering with the traceroute results.
- Restart your device, router, or modem, and check your network settings and firewall rules. This can resolve any resource problems, infrastructure changes, or overlapping jobs that may affect the traceroute results.

ii. Here are some tips for improving site connection speed:

- Enable compression in your web server configuration (Apache, Nginx etc) to minimize file sizes
- Enable browser caching through HTTP headers to reduce repeat asset downloads
- Minify JavaScript, CSS and HTML files to reduce payload sizes that need to transfer
- Optimize images by reducing resolutions, file sizes, enabling WEBP format
- Asynchronously load non-critical assets like images, CSS, JS files to speed up initial page load
- Reduce redirects to avoid additional lookups and roundtrips
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute assets and cache pages geographically closer to visitors
- Upgrade to more performant web hosting - factors like better data center connectivity, improved infrastructure and caching make a difference
- Check for and eliminate unnecessary plugins/extensions that can hamper page load speeds
- Test with online tools like PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest to analyze bottlenecks

Implementing these technical enhancements sequentially can compound for dramatically faster site connections. Monitoring speed metrics allows quantifying website optimizations over time.