how does Ping work?
In: Technology
Imagine that you want to see how fast the post office is, so you mail your friend a letter that says “Hey – send this back to me as soon as you get it.” As soon as you drop it in the mailbox, you start a stopwatch.
When the letter comes back, your stopwatch says it’s been six days, so your ping is six days.
Internet ping is exactly that, only with an electronic signal from your computer to some faraway computer and back again. For most games, 20-50 millisecond ping is good, 100 milliseconds is getting too slow for fast-reaction games like shooters or Street Fighter, and up around 300-400ms even non-reaction games can get a little annoying.
The word comes from submarine sonar, where you send out a sound pulse (which, inside the sub, sounds like ‘ping’) and time how long it takes to reach an object and bounce back, and the time interval tells you the range.
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