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kpossible
Premium Member
join:2003-09-11

kpossible to parkut

Premium Member

to parkut

Re: Question about ping testing

Okay, I get some of that. So why is it used at all if you don't know who is not responding and who is? Sorry for the oversimplification!
hudiat
join:2011-10-13

1 recommendation

hudiat

Member

Ping requests get dropped or treated differently if the network is under heavy load. So yahoo will have many drops high times as they don't have the capacity as google, so your priority is last for ping requests behind real traffic, increasing time for a response or dropped altogether.

Google being the force they are can handle so much more data and connections than probably anyone, so if their connections are never getting congested enough to drop ping requests, they go through fine.

People usually say to use google because they are the most reliable. I can't think of any other place that handles the shear amount of traffic as google AND remains one of the fastest most reliable services out there. I mean how often does google services go down, or get laggy, almost never, they are just so consistent that is a good destination to test against over time and expect similar results.

Tl:dr you may get 1000 one day and 600 another on yahoo and it is likely something at yahoo is causing that not your connections. But if all of a sudden your google numbers change, their reliability and consistency is high enough that it more than likely means something on the home or ISP end is causing the delay or drops. Not always, just more likely.

kpossible
Premium Member
join:2003-09-11

kpossible

Premium Member

Thanks!

Bill_MI
Bill In Michigan
MVM
join:2001-01-03
Royal Oak, MI
TP-Link Archer C7
Linksys WRT54GS
Linksys WRT54G v4

Bill_MI to kpossible

MVM

to kpossible
said by kpossible:

Okay, I get some of that. So why is it used at all if you don't know who is not responding and who is? Sorry for the oversimplification!

It's more like... if you get a reply you know there's connectivity. That's about ALL you know. If no reply, connectivity is still unknown.

I must admit I usually type yahoo.com because it's easy. Response varies with the server you get, though. You'll see the IP and times change together.

Ping tells a lot of basic stuff. If it can't find the name, DNS isn't working (so use an IP instead). Ping still remains a good starting point to diagnose a network.