I was just about settled on a host when my friend said, "They're too slow." He then showed me some data on his computer that he obtained by pinging hosts via csu.net.

Here are samples of the stats he showed me:

His host -
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 56.743/57.280/58.780 ms

My prospective host -
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 90.274/93.606/120.086 ms

He did several comparative 20-packet pings. The above are fairly typical results.

Can anyone help me understand the significance (IF any) of this sort of testing?

Aloha from Hawaii,
Bellgamin

You really won't notice the differnce unless you are running something like a game server.... If its just general html pages, you won't see any major load differnces...

As long as download and upload speeds are good, and you do not plan to run a game server, the pings will make no difference. It could just be that the data center used by this host is further away.

In other words, it does not mean they are slow at all.

Actually, ping results are sometimes not completely reflective of the network speed. Some routers and switches place ICMP traffic on the lowest end of transit which may show a fast network having poor ping results.

An extremely low ping for a website isn't really necessary.

If it is too high though, requesting pages, and every image on that page can be delayed noticably if the ping is in the 400+ since the ping effects everything on the page, it has to request, recieve, request, recieve and so on for each image. The requesting is all about the ping.

A low ping is only really necesary for Streaming data, like Game servers that continously send data back and forth between several computers connected at the same time. Everyone has to have the latest information else you get lag (screen freezes while it tries to catch up, in this time you could get blown away), if you have ever played counter strike, quake3 or any fps online game you will know.

thats putting it all simply :)

ping is almost useless to detemine speed, unless you ping from 20 different servers in different areas of the world, and then take an average... otherwise your ping results are not truely reflective of the server response times.

Originally posted by RackMy.com
Actually, ping results are sometimes not completely reflective of the network speed. Some routers and switches place ICMP traffic on the lowest end of transit which may show a fast network having poor ping results.


It can also be a sign of an overburdened router. If a router is working to hard, then it is going to take longer to respond to ping requests -- as Mike said -- and you will get poorer response. The problem is you do not know if the slower response is indicitive of distance, capacity, or overtaxed CPU.

One other thing to keep in mind: It takes approximately 2 seconds for someone to say 40 milliseconds, there are 1000 milliseconds in a second, which means that 40 milliseconds is 1/50 of 2 seconds. Realistically, there is not that much difference in speed between the two.

Originally posted by bellgamin


Here are samples of the stats he showed me:

His host -
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 56.743/57.280/58.780 ms

My prospective host -
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 90.274/93.606/120.086 ms


Hope I dont get flamed to ask a stupid question.. so the lower the ping figure the better or vice versa?

Si, amigo -- the lower the better.

By the way, a superb place for checking out your site (or anyone else's) as to speed, traceroute, WHOIS, etc -- all on one neat-o little page -- is here...

http://www.alertsite.com/cgi-bin/tsite3.pl

A lot of different things can affect ping speed, such as distance from the site you are pinging, traffic on the PARTICULAR route at that PARTICULAR time, and so forth. Ergo, a site that is slow from, say, CA, might show REALLY fast from, say, NY.

Moral-- it takes a number of pings at various times from various locales in order to reach strong conclusions.

Bellgamin