which is better ? high ping? or low ping?

seem to get the same download results, whether my ping is high or low


Mart

 

High Ping is a 1 - Low Ping is a 0 ....... I find a Pong is better - you have me on ignore so cannot read this anyway

 

Low ping is better and describes the time taken for a packet of information to travel to it's destination and back (like a sonar "ping").

It's usually proportional to the distance and number of network hops your packet has to make.

Over a period for a long download, won't make much difference but in a situation were the information needs to be distributed quickly like online action gaming, it obviously helps.

At a very superficial level -think of you bandwidth as the number of lanes of the information superhighway and your ping times as the length of route to your destination. (As long as you don't saturate your highway with packets and then it gets trickier).

You can have a 20 lane highway but if your sending 10 packets (cars) to Australia and back, it'll take some time to get them back (high ping) but if you're only sending them to the corner shop, they'll be back in no time (low ping).

And just edited to add within the same analogy - if you only have a two lane highway and want to send your 10 cars to the shop, they all have to wait their turn so even for short routes, this will lengthen the time taken to complete the transaction.

 

In no way scientific but here's a rough illustration:

Internet is full of stuff if you are really into it. I posted a thing on here a few weeks ago about the bloke who actually wrote ping and it was interesting (if geeky) reading...

 

In practical terms, you want a ping of less than 100ms (ideally ~50ms) for online gaming otherwise when you pull the trigger your target has moved on by the time the gun actually fires.

 

Many thanks,

pings varies from 48-67 depending on time of day,

so it would appear to be ok (ish)


mart

 

depends on your ISP !

ADSL 30 -50 really

Cable anything from 8 - 30

Mines currently 17ms

 

I'll be damned if I can get my cable to ping faster than 30ms during the day.

 

In game ping is not usually the same as a regular ping test. They normally add in game latency to the figure. I.e. whilst playing a game run a ping to the server your playing on (if you can get that far) and there will be a substantial difference.

Ah I remember back in the day playing Counterstrike beta 1.3 or thereabouts at work during a night shift. Had a 5ms ping to a lot of servers and most people were on dial up or ISDN at the time. Oh the fun of owning a room full of terrorists with an MP5 before they knew what hit them

Simon

 

Depends on what your using for downloading. FTP is affected by both latency (100ms +) and packet loss (much more so than for latency).

Low ping is obviously better as shows a shorter distance between you and your destination IP. Dont forget that many routes can be Asynchronous i.e. the outbound and return routes differ. A trace only shows the outbound route but sometimes you can be routing back via the US etc.

Simon