Why/how is WinMTR 30 x faster than tracert / ftrace / wtrace etc?

Question

When I run WinMTR and trace any host, like google.com for example, the built-in windows command tracert (on Win 7) and also third party commands like ftrace take 30 seconds ish to finish even when I set the pings and delays between hops to minimum and try UDP (on ftrace). With WinMTR, tracing the same host takes <2 seconds to show all hosts and at least one ping for each.

Why is that, and is there a windows command line tool which can get faster results like WinMTR, as I need the output into a script. WinMTR only has a GUI (can start by command line but it still ends up in the GUI). WinMTR is OSS but I don't know C++ just Perl.

Answer 1

WinMTR works slightly differently to other programs such as tracert and ftrace.

With a conventional traceroute tool, the tool starts with an ICMP / UDP packet with the TTL set to 1, receives the response and then processes a packet with the TTL set to 2 and so on until it reaches either the maximum hop-count (typically 30), or the destination host.

WinMTR instead starts a new thread for each hop from 1 to the maximum hop-count, and runs these threads independently. This is why you get the total hop count so quickly - you're not waiting for each hop to complete before starting the next.

To get the same effect from the command line, you'll need a tool which works the same way as WinMTR ... I'm not aware of any windows command line tools which work this way though.