Network Latency Test

What causes network latency issues?

Network latency issues occur when network packets fail to reach their destinations or experience delays on the journey. Such issues can be caused by many different factors, but it helps to get a working definition of network latency before diving into network latency issues. 

Issues with network latency response time or “high latency” might look like websites not loading, data taking too long to send, and slow applications.

Common causes of latency include:

• Propagation, or the time to takes a packet to travel from source to destination
• Overutilized routers or too few routers
• Transmission types like WAN or fiber optic
• Storage delays

What are the differences between network latency testing and monitoring?

Network latency monitoring involves using a tool to monitor, detect, and troubleshoot IP latency issues. This can be done using a tool specifically designed for network latency monitoring or using a more generalized network monitoring tool capable of performing network latency monitoring. The latency monitoring process involves tracking applications running on a network to determine whether they’re experiencing latency issues. The network itself can also experience these issues. 

Once you know where the issues are in the network or on an application, you can use the information gained from network latency monitoring to perform network latency tests or network delay tests. This involves analyzing network response times and identifying the root causes of issues.

Why is monitoring network latency important?

Monitoring network latency is important because latency can critically impact the performance of your network and the devices and applications on it. When latency is low or otherwise acceptable, network performance tends to be sufficient unless impacted by some other issue.

However, when network latency is too high, devices, services, and applications can slow to a crawl or stop. In the worst case, unchecked network latency can result in packet loss. Packet loss refers to when one or more packets fail to reach their destination because of network disruptions, connectivity issues, or latency. Even if you get the network back up to speed relatively soon after it went down, those packets dropped due to latency must start their journeys all over again. This can critically cut into network performance speeds.

How to find and measure latency in a network

Network latency can be measured in two ways: roundtrip time (RTT) or time to first byte (TTFB). RTT measures the amount of time it takes for a data packet to make a successful journey from source to destination and back again. TTFB measures how long it takes for the server to receive the first byte of the data packet once a client sends a request. 

To manually measure latency on Windows, you can open a command prompt, type “tracert” and then type the destination you think is moving slowly. The sum after adding up the measurements is the latency between your system and the application or website in question. 

However, using a tool to measure network latency can help provide a more automated—and typically more accurate—measurement.

How to troubleshoot and reduce network latency

There are a few strategies you can try to help reduce network latency:

• Check how many people are using your network: Network strain caused by too many users can be a huge factor when it comes to latency. Check to see how many people are trying to use your network at the same time, and if you notice latency is high during certain times of day, like after lunch, your network may be overextended. 
• Try wired connection: Wireless connections are especially susceptible to latency. Try using an Ethernet cable to reduce latency and increase speeds. 
• Reboot your hardware: If you haven’t shut down and restarted your hardware in a while, this might be causing network latency issues.
• Use a network latency monitoring tool: Network latency monitoring tools are designed to help users find latency in networks by offering comprehensive insights into how systems are interacting. This can include visually representing applications and their statuses on a single dashboard, so you can more easily identify, analyze, and fix network latency issues.

How do network latency monitoring tools work?

When many different computers, applications, users, and servers are competing for resources on one network, it can be challenging to keep track of it all. Without a network latency tool, you may have to manually go through each application on your network and check its status, which is not only labor-intensive but can be incredibly inefficient.

Network latency tools work by helping users streamline finding, troubleshooting, and resolving network latency issues by monitoring and analyzing packets.

How does network latency monitoring work in NPM?

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is designed to be an automated solution for capturing packet latency data points across your network. NPM can also monitor networks and the devices connected to it to help you more easily drill down into network latency issues. Using NPM, you can more easily drill down on performance issues using the included deep packet inspection tool, which is designed to help you more easily analyze packets.

NPM’s quality of experience dashboard is specially designed to measure network latency using deep packet inspection and is built to analyze over 1,200 applications right out of the box. With these insights, SolarWinds NPM can help you more easily identify the source of performance problems as well as determine if latency issues are being caused by applications or the network. 

NPM is built to help eliminate the need for guesswork when it comes to network latency tests and can help you dig into important issues by providing deeper performance insights you can leverage to help solve a range of network issues.