Can someone explain to me ping? The network term.
In: Technology
Think of it like a call and response. If I ask the server if it can hear me, how fast does it get back to me? That’s what a ping is.
If I have a 160ms ping it takes 1.6 seconds to input my action into the game or whatever I’m playing
As far as I remember it’s essentially the time it takes for you to send data and receive data from a server.
The bigger the number the longer it takes for you to send and recieve data. Hence why in gaming people with very high pings have massive lag.
Ping as a verb means to test the connection between your computer and some other computer (or server) on the internet or network.
Ping as a noun (as often seen in games, such as 60 ms) is a metric that tells you the round trip time (RTT) from your computer, to the destination, and back.
Like ping pong, ping is a request to see if somebody is there. You get a time for the return message 🙂
do you want to know the origin of the term or the technical details of how pinging a node on a network works?
When you “ping” a remote computer, it allows you to find out a) whether the remote computer can be contacted over your network and, if so, b) how quickly it responds.
Gamers use it to find out how quickly their server responds, because speed is important when you’re playing against lots of people logged into the same server. Network technical people use it to find out whether a particular remote server is contactable. Or indeed, whether ANY remote server is contactable, as a way of checking whether their computer has a working LAN/internet connection.
Note that the inability to connect to a particular remote location via ping does not necessarily mean that the remote server is down. It often means that the remote server has been configured not to respond to pings (either at all, or only from certain IP addresses).
Ping is a software utility that is used to test network (specifically TCP/IP) connections.
It works by sending a message via a special protocol called ICMP to another server which has to have a ping “server” enabled.
That server then responds and the time between the initial message and the response is displayed so you can see how efficient the connection is.
The term originally comes from the sonar used on submarines.
They would send out a loud pulse of sound (it actually made a ‘ping’ noise) which would bounce off any nearby large objects.
By listening out for echoes, they could determine the range and direction of other submarines / etc.
In networking, computers can send out an ICMP ECHO request to another computer, which just means “Send acknowledgement of this message immediately!”
If you get a response, you know the other computer is alive and reachable. And by measuring the time between sending the message and receiving a response, you can gauge the speed / congestion / distance / hops of the network link between them.
In things like online gaming, the game server will send its own version of the ECHO command to the game client, to determine the time delay between the two machines. It can use this information to determine if the player will have a good experience (for instance, connecting to a server halfway round the world could give you a half-second response time, which is far too slow for a 3d shooter to be playable), and it can try to compensate for their specific delay time (known as ‘latency’) in its calculations.
Ping is just the time it takes for data to make a “round trip”.
When you calculate ping, you send a small arbitrary piece of data to a destination. When the destination receives that bit of data, it send a small sample of data back. The time it takes for the “reply” to be received is your ping, which is typically measured in milliseconds.
Depending on the application, you may want low ping or high ping. For gaming, you are generally making indeterministic actions on the fly, so the server needs to be able to give you immediate feedback. Generally, a ping under 30ms is “good” while anything above 100ms is “bad”. For some applications, reliably transferring data is more important than the time it takes to get to reach it’s destination and back. For example, satellites sent out by NASA, such as New Horizons at Pluto have a ping of around 4.5 hours because they are very very far away and the data cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
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