Whenever I ping my website, I get 5% packet loss consistently. However, pinging other sites such as google produce no packet loss. I'm really not fond of my webserver dropping packets, but I'm not sure if it's just the route or my server or something to contact my hosting provider about.
What I basically needs is something like traceroute, but that also checks for packet loss. Is there such a tool on Linux and/or OpenBSD?
A tool like mtr (https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/) (Linux man page, FreeBSD) should do the trick.
But be aware that interpreting the output can be tricky! Be sure you understand what you see...
Traceroute only shows 1/2 the path: the path from the host doing the traceroute to the destination. To get the full path, one must log into the remote server, and do a traceroute back to the local system. Should you have root privs on the webserver, doing a tcpdump to watch for ICMP echo-requests from your local host will tell you if they're all getting there. Then, send pings from the web server back to your local host, and count those.
If the server's CPU is high, it will not respond to ICMP requests. RSVP and other protocols may have ICMP's QoS at a very low priority, so it might be worthwhile to check how actual traffic transfers between your two hosts are performing. A loss of a packet will cause a perceptible hang in the data stream; If there's no pause in a file transfer, then no packet loss exists.
