Let's consider A (client) and B (server) where A makes download from B.
How much can a bad routing from A to B affect the download speed ?
A traceroute from A to B returns a path that is 10 hops long, with a round-trip latency of 300ms. It also shows ~10% packet loss at hop four. Under normal conditions, the average round-trip latency between A and B is between 10ms and 30ms.
Could this sort of impact reduce A download speed drasticaly or as long as both side and routes have enough link for the full speed of A from B and vice-versa it should maintain the same speed ?
Besides tracert and the ping analyse of A to B what else is used to identify the problem ?
If you need extra information please let me know.
This question touches on several issues relating to various things. I'll try and answer them in order, and then provide a bit more detailed explanation.
(Paraphrasing slightly):
Addressing these points in order:
Regarding the impact of latency on download speed, many TCP implementations are configured to use a receive window size of 64kbytes. When you have a high latency connection between two hosts (more specifically a high bandwidth delay product, this window size can often limit your effective throughput, as TCP will stop transmitting buffered data until it starts receiving ACKs for already sent data from the far end.
EDIT: Depending on how you have pingplotter configured, it may not be providing you with an accurate representation of the loss on your connection. If pingplotter is using ICMP, it's possible that networks will drop/deprioritise this traffic in times of congestion, as it is not considered 'user traffic'. Also, any data about the loss at intermediate hops should be considered suspect, for the reasons mentioned above.
If possible, it would be interesting to have a packet capture running on your host (this can be done with Wireshark for example), and to look at the analysis within Wireshark relating to the actual TCP conversations that your applications are performing.
Yes, high latency on a network connection can certainly impact on download speed (there will be a lower impact if the TCP window is reasonably large, so that the source can send several packets without having to wait for each one to be ACKed). And any significant packet loss will have a catastrophic effect on performance, as every time a packet is lost the download will effectively stop for the duration of the TCP retransmission timeout.