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.
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.
do you want to know the origin of the term or the technical details of how pinging a node on a network works?
Like ping pong, ping is a request to see if somebody is there. You get a time for the return message 🙂
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 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.
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.
If I have a 160ms ping it takes 1.6 seconds to input my action into the game or whatever I’m playing
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.
Ah, I see you have the machine that goes ‘ping!’. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to – that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.
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