PING  

A basic TCP / IP tool for checking round-trip times. 

Ping -- which you can find in your computer's Windows directory as "ping.exe" -- is a simple tool that uses a special kind of TCP packet to generate what is called an "echo request" from a remote machine. What Ping does is send a message, then display how long it took for that message to get to the destination and back. The shorter the response time, the faster the round trip. Responses are measured in milliseconds, which are thousandths of a second. Ping will also tell you if any of the packets it sent out were never answered. It's common for some data to get "lost" in the Internet when things get busy. When no response is received to an echo request, Ping will display an asterisk ( * ). 

The output from running Ping looks like this:

C:\>ping www.yahoo.com
Pinging www.yahoo.com [204.71.177.71] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 204.71.177.71: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=248
Reply from 204.71.177.71: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=248
Reply from 204.71.177.71: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=248
Reply from 204.71.177.71: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=248 

In this case, we pinged a Yahoo server called "www.yahoo.com." The only thing you really need to look at is the "time= " column. For optimum performance, you want Ping times of less than 250-300ms. You also would like your Ping times to be fairly consistent, like the ones above. If you run Ping a few times, and the response times you receive fluctuate wildly, or are greater than 400ms to 500ms, you might experience lags in the in your transfers, and possibly even complete disconnections ("dumps"). Poor performance like this occurs when the connection between your ISP and our servers is congested. This congestion is NOT under our control. 

Problems with PING: There are two main problems with using Ping to generate an accurate feel for how well your connection is performing. 

First: Remember when we said Ping uses a special type of packet? Well that packet is called an ICMP packet. ICMP packets aren't always treated the same as TCP packets on the Internet. Because it's a diagnostic packet, some gateways or routers assign it with lower priority than "regular" TCP traffic. For that reason, your Ping times might reflect longer values than TCP traffic might take. If your Ping times are very long, or you receive a lot of asterisks, it is a fair assumption that your TCP traffic would be delayed, too. 

Second: Ping only lets you know of network conditions at the instant you run it. This is a problem because your performance differences from one second to the next can be huge! So, Ping is useful as long as you recognize its shortcomings. 

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