whats a ping?

Question

when im playing a game online and it tells me what my ping is, what does that mean?
i know the lower ping you have the better youre connection is and you have less lag, but what do the numbers actually measure?

Answer 1

Isn't it for a password???

Answer 2

You are talking about network pings. Sometimes games implement their own "ping" in which one node (e.g. your client game) sends a simple message, waits for the server to receive that message and return with an answer.

In the IP (Internet Protocol) world, there is also the "ping" command; from a Unix/Linux/OSX or NT/XP command prompt, you can type "ping www.yahoo.com". The ping command sends a special type of IP message called an ICMP packet that is similar to the in-game ping described above.

ICMP packets are used frequently, but nowadays with the proliferation of firewalls and complex network routings, sometimes ICMP packets get dropped or ignored. However, pinging yahoo.com or google.com typically works from home or from 'transparent internet' configurations that many universities and corporations run.

Answer 3

A ping is a signal another computer or the server sends to your computer, which is bounced back and received by whoever sent it.
The number is the amount of time (miliseconds? im not sure) it takes for the signal to travel to your computer and back. So, naturally, the shorter the time, the better your connection must be.
It is sort of like radar and sonar in planes and ships which use soundwaves to detect objects.

Answer 4

Ping is a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. Ping works by sending ICMP “echo request” packets ("Ping?") to the target host and listening for ICMP “echo response” replies (sometimes dubbed "Pong!" as an analog from the Ping Pong table tennis sport.) Using interval timing and response rate, ping estimates the round-trip time (generally in milliseconds although the unit is often omitted) and packet loss (if any) rate between hosts.

The word ping is also frequently used as a verb or noun, where it can refer directly to the round-trip time, the act of running a ping program or measuring the round-trip time. See also: Ping (video games)

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Sample pinging
3 See also
4 External links



[edit] History
Mike Muuss wrote the program in December, 1983, as a tool to troubleshoot odd behavior on an IP network. He named it after the pulses of sound made by a sonar, since its operation is analogous to active sonar in submarines, in which an operator issues a pulse of energy (a network packet) at the target, which then bounces from the target and is received by the operator. Later David L. Mills provided a backronym, "Packet INternet Grouper (Groper)" (sometimes also defined as "Packet Inter-Network Groper "), also by other people "Packed IN(ternet) Gopher", after the small rodents.

The usefulness of ping in assisting the "diagnosis" of Internet connectivity issues was impaired from late in 2003, when a number of Internet Service Providers filtered out ICMP Type 8 (echo request) messages at their network boundaries. This was partly due to the increasing use of ping for target reconnaissance, for example by Internet worms such as Welchia that flood the Internet with ping requests in order to locate new hosts to infect. Not only did the availability of ping responses leak information to an attacker, it added to the overall load on networks, causing problems to routers across the Internet.

There are two schools of thought concerning ICMP on the public Internet: those who say it should be largely disabled to enable network 'stealth', and those who say it should be enabled to allow proper Internet diagnostics.

These two schools of thought merge when considering intranet/extranet networks within the same organization. An example would be an organization which maintains 'buffer' network(s) to shield said net from the raw internet, such a network is usually described as a DMZ (after the military designation 'demilitarized zone'). In such a scenario an organization would maintain both a network(s) that would allow ICMP packets to radiate within the internal (trusted network[s]), and disallow ICMP (ping) packets in a separated network that would more often than not include raw internet facing systems

Answer 5

The time it takes for your network to communicate with another network....

A ping is a request from one workstation to another (or to a server) to determine connection speed.

Try this: Click Start, Run; type CMD. At the prompt, type ping www.yahoo.com

The results will show you just how long it took to send a packet to yahoo and how long it took yahoo to respond....

Answer 6

it sends out a signal, ping (thing ping pong maybe), then it waits for signal to be returned. It shows how fast your connection is.

Answer 7

it's like sonar for the internet, your computer sends out a ping (it's some type of signal) to look for a location to communicate with, i think.

Answer 8

The numbers measure the number of milliseconds it takes for the host to respond to an inquiry sent by the client computer.

Answer 9

Someone get the machine that goes 'ping.'

Answer 10

too low and too high ping means poor connection... it simply tells you the speed of your net at that very moment

Answer 11

a ping is when sombody either hacks in to your computer or you receive somthing like an E-mail ect.