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"PING"

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by planet1 1 view

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What is "PING" when run from the RUN dialog box on a stand alone Win 98SE PC? What does it do while on a dial up connection and why does this sometimes speed things up when the connection is bogged down or slow?

8 replies

by kent.manley

PING is a utility that is used to determine the network latency between you and an arbitrary endpoint, usually a host, although it can be a piece of network equipment. It really doesn't "speed things up," although the name lookup associate with theping application can make an http connection run a little faster.

It does not matter whether you're a dialup TCP/IP user or on a fixed network, ping does a TCP/IP Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) query regardless; the issue is which interface on your computer it uses. Under Unix, there's a switch to specify which interface you'd like to use with the application.

Hope this answers the question.

Kent

by rickpawlyk

ping uses timed IP/ICMP ECHO_REQUEST and ECHO_REPLY packets to probe the "distance" to the target machine. it shouldn't speed any thing up.

by happy

Assuming you run a continous ping with the
-t switch,it can "speed" things up as it keeps the line up.If you look at the first reply this is often much slower (time=1024ms)
than the rest,while the line is raised.After that, generally the time will settle down (70ms).

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