An administrator is trying to optimize a connection to an off-site NFS server. Which of the following commands would BEST display the problems with packet sizes between hops on the network?

tracepath sends packets with progressively increasing sizes and notes where fragmentation or drops occur at each hop, effectively discovering the path MTU between the client and the NFS server. For NFS optimization this is critical because large read/write block sizes can be silently fragmented at hops with smaller MTUs, causing severe throughput degradation that is invisible to simpler tools.

ping tests reachability and round-trip latency and can probe specific packet sizes with the -s flag, but it does not trace individual hops or automatically discover the path MTU across the full route.

tracert is the Windows equivalent of traceroute and reports per-hop latency but does not perform MTU discovery or identify packet size constraints between hops.

nmap is a network scanner used for port discovery and service enumeration; it does not trace routing paths or measure MTU between hops.