Some one asked me the other day why traceroute pauses for a while sometimes between hops. By a while i mean 20 - 30 seconds and i then i realised i didnt know why.

Could anyone tell me why or is it just a fact of life ?

Sean

Are you doing traceroute with name resolution? If you're just doing it by IP address, then it usually goes quite a bit faster. The delay with names is of course caused by different nameservers responses to queries. Some are slow to respond while others don't respond and you have to wait for a timeout.