I wanted to know why PathPing is faster than Tracert. I googled a lot but was not satisfied with the answers I found, most of the answers talked about its features but not about why it is faster than tracert.
Tracert works by incremental TTL and gathering response from every node until it reaches destination
But how does PathPing work?
It isn't faster. PathPing does nothing more than combine the traceroute and ping methods in one utility, i.e. start pinging each node in the path once discovered.
In most cases the major amount of slowdown in either application comes from the process of name resolution rather than the actual tracing.
Wikipedia goes into some detail:
PathPing is a network utility supplied in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It combines the functionality of Ping with that of Traceroute (in Windows: tracert), by providing details of the path between two hosts and Ping-like statistics for each node in the path based on samples taken over a time period, depending on how many nodes are between the start and end host.
The advantages of PathPing over ping and traceroute are that each node is pinged as the result of a single command, and that the behavior of nodes is studied over an extended time period, rather than the Ping's default sample of four messages or Traceroute's default single route trace.
The disadvantage is that, using the default settings, it often takes more than five minutes to produce a result.
...which suggests pathping is actually slower!