Can someone explain to me ping? The network term.
In: Technology
Basically, it is a measure of how long it takes a signal to get from source to destination, and then back again.
The late Mike Muuss wrote the “ping” program and named it by analogy to the sound sonar makes for echolocation. The idea is that you would “ping” another computer, and you could find out roughly how far away the other computer was based on how long it took for your ping to get a response.
Here is his website in which he explains the history of the program, which he coded up in one night: https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html
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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I tell “Marco!” And push the start button on my stop watch. Once I hear the other guy yell “polo!” I push the stop button on my stop watch. The time is the ping value.
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