Can someone explain to me ping? The network term.
In: Technology
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.
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