Strongly Typed

After spending a couple hours looking at Perfmon counters on several different webservers I was pretty sure we weren't having an application problem. However, I still wasn't positive. Later in the day Bob suggested I just try a simple ping and see what that looked like. Sure enough, pings to anything at the profile.xanga.com co-lo were an order of magnitude slower than pings to the xanga.com co-lo. Doing a traceroute revealed that the last hop was the slowest, which indicates that the problem is most likely with the network at the profile.xanga.com co-lo.

Apparently John recommended checking ping times and traceroutes two nights ago, but I missed that somehow. Moral of the story: start with the simplest tools available and work your way up. As a programmer I'm guilty of starting with the code or appserver as soon as something goes wrong.