ping test

big_moe

im just wondering what do the results of a ping test mean and what does it tell me about my connection?

any answers?

cheers
moe

BKtje

a "ping" is the amount of time that passes between your computer sending data and then receiving a reply from another system.

While not critical for browsing or downloading its very important in games. eg: imagine your fighting in the iraq war. The more delay you have sending messages to your limbs to move or shoot or whatever the morce chance you'll miss or be shot or visible. Same in gaming.

The lower the ping time the less delay between wanting to move and actually moving basically

Cryos

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\ping boards.ie

Pinging boards.ie [82.195.131.128] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 82.195.131.128: bytes=32 time=38ms TTL=60
Reply from 82.195.131.128: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=60
Reply from 82.195.131.128: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=60
Reply from 82.195.131.128: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=60

Ping statistics for 82.195.131.128:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 31ms, Maximum = 38ms, Average = 32ms

Right basicaly an ping test tells you how fast your are communicating with other computers/severs, an ping test sends 4 packets of data to an specified dns or computer ip address, that computer then returns the data that you have sent.

32bytes of data is incredibaly small and therefore is used to test network speeds, the time= is the amount of time it took for you to send the data and get databack, for adsl products it can range from 10-40ms for irish based computers.

the TTL (Time to Live) is the amount of time that the 32bytes of data will spend trying to get to that address.

If you specified an wrong ip address you will have 0 sent packets and 0 received packets resulting in an loss of 4 (100% loss), if you get an persentage loss less than 100% (normaly 25% 50 and 75%) it may indicate that you are having connection problems or the computer you are trying to reach is having connection problems.

thats my perception of it

OfflerCrocGod

Originally posted by Blitz
TTL (Time to Live) is the amount of time that the 32bytes of data will spend trying to get to that address.

Not exactly - it's the number of hops that the packet will travel through before it's trown away - 60 means it will travel through 60 hops; at every hop the TTL is decreased until 0 is reached that would result in a host unreachable error. Time doesn't really come into it. You can set it using the -t flag for ping i.e. ping -t 3 google.com sets the packets TTL to 3. Essentially what tracert does.