System noise can negatively impact the performance of HPC systems, and the interconnection network is one of the main factors contributing to this problem. To mitigate this effect, adaptive routing sends packets on non-minimal paths if they are less congested. However, while this may mitigate interference caused by congestion, it also generates more traffic since packets traverse additional hops, causing in turn congestion on other applications and on the application itself. In this paper, we first describe how to estimate network noise. By following these guidelines, we show how noise can be reduced by using routing algorithms which select minimal paths with a higher probability. We exploit this knowledge to design an algorithm which changes the probability of selecting minimal paths according to the application characteristics. We validate our solution on microbenchmarks and real-world applications on two systems relying on a Dragonfly interconnection network, showing noise reduction and performance improvement.is feared by datacenter operators in so-called incast or hot-spot (many-to-one) patterns. In addition to this, adaptive routing may be affected by the so-called phantom congestion problem [46]. Namely, as congestion information is propagated with some delay, a node may react too late to congestion events. In this paper, we will be first to demonstrate and quantify the influence of different routing schemes on network noise in practice.Analyzing network noise in detail is delicate because in practice, when observing application delays, it is hard to distinguish between network noise, operating system noise, and application imbalance. Other works have used network counters but may run into the fallacy that correlation is not causation by ignoring the aspects of unrelated traffic. We will clarify several potential problems in investigations of network noise and develop a set of general guidelines for our analysis. Using these guidelines, we study the relationship between different adaptive routing schemes, application performance, and network noise. Our findings on two large-scale Cray Aries systems, Piz Daint and NERSC's Cori, are remarkable: not only will changing the adaptive routing mode reduce communication times and speed up applications up to twice, but it will also significantly reduce performance variation.We find that the best routing mode that minimizes network noise and maximizes performance depends not only on the characteristics of the allocation but also on the communication load. For example, large-scale alltoall communications are best routed with the default mode whereas many other communication patterns benefit from mostly minimal routing. Because this all depends on the location of the communication peers, there is no simple static rule to select the best routing mode. To address this, we develop a simple but effective dynamic routing library that observes the network state through local network counters and adjusts the routing mode for each message based on application characteristics s...