A few questions about Ping.

[Lavezzi]

I have been measuring the performance of a few target servers located around the world over the course of a week, sending 120 packets, 4 times a day at 6 hour intervals.

I have a lot of data to analyse and i'm trying to figure out the answer to a few questions that don't make sense to me at the moment:

I'm thinking there should be a correllation between large RTTs and packet loss events, as if a packet does not return before a timeout occurs then it will be considered as lost?

Based on that theory I was thinking that packets should get lost when the measured RTTs are close to their maximum values? However a lot of my results aren't showing that, losses occur sometimes when RTT max values are relatively low.

Am I right in thinking that these losses are influenced by network path and pinging frequency?

I hope I have explained myself well enough, any help that you could provide is much appreciated!

 

[Cerebrus' Maw]

My network days are a long time ago but...

A low RTT time could point to a TTL being exceeded very fast. I'm not sure if a RTT is delivered if a package fails, as I vaguely remember that RTT is time measure over both directions on a link, but not dependent on whether the package was delivered successfully.

So if a package was delivered to a router on the first hop but could not go any further, the TTL would drop each time the router tried to pass it on, exceed and get send back to the sender with a low RTT time.

At least that is my very high brow view of it, I could be completely off....