Ping latency

You may have heard of ‘ping’ when playing games, for example. It’s very similar to checking the latency of a network connection.

When you ‘ping’ a server, you are sending a small packet of data to the server and then waiting for the server to send a response back to you. The time it takes for the packet to go from your computer to the server and back is called the ‘ping latency’ or just ‘ping’.

Ping is the time between sending a request and receiving a response from the server.

Why is it used?

When you’re playing a game, or visiting a website, you want things to feel responsive. Things should happen quickly when you click on something, and websites should, ideally, load instantly when you click on a link.

When either of those happen, what needs to happen is:

• Your computer - the client - sends a request to the server. That has one ‘load’ of latency attached to it, which is the time it takes for the request to go from your computer to the server.
• The server processes the request and sends a response back to your computer. That also has a ‘load’ of latency attached to it, which is the time it takes for the response to get back to the client.

The total time it takes for the request to go from the client to the server and back is the ping!

How to check your ping

Open up a terminal (or a command prompt) and type this command:

ping dylancode.dev

You’ll get something back like this:

PING dylancode.dev (172.67.152.137) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.67.152.137: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=9.22 ms
64 bytes from 172.67.152.137: icmp_seq=6 ttl=58 time=8.77 ms
64 bytes from 172.67.152.137: icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=8.35 ms
64 bytes from 172.67.152.137: icmp_seq=8 ttl=58 time=8.66 ms
...

This gives us the time it took for each packet to go from our computer to the server and back, which is the ping latency. In my case, it’s about 9ms, which is pretty good.

Why measure ping?

We usually measure the ping instead of the latency of just the request or just the response, because the ping gives us a better idea of how responsive the connection is. If the ping is high, it means that either the request or the response is taking a long time, which can make things feel slow and unresponsive. You might have a good connection to the server, but if the server is slow to process requests, then the ping will be high, and things will feel slow.